General Epstein Articles

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I dated Jeffrey Epstein. The files must be released
by Stacey Williams
The Guardian
Thu 4 Sep 2025 06.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... tein-files

This is not a partisan issue. The American people – and Epstein’s many victims – deserve transparency

In 1986, my life went from black-and-white to color. It was the year I taped a Duran Duran poster to my rural Pennsylvania high school locker, and then months later hung out with band members backstage at the Paris runway shows. It was the year I went from cleaning bathrooms for $3.35 an hour to making $50k in a day for a Maybelline shoot. Modeling opened a door into a gorgeous, creative, elite world – a dream born of a biological accident.

It is also what led me, decades later, into the very uncomfortable position of speaking out about the horrific legacy of the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whom I briefly dated in 1993.

I was introduced to Epstein at a dinner party, which I attended at the request of my then agent, Faith Kates. He was charming and smart, and didn’t condescend as we connected over current events and the state of the world, a rare experience for me in those scenarios.

The brief relationship that emerged was consensual. But some of the events that took place within the confines of that relationship were not.

Last October, I came forward with a story I had kept private (with the exception of sharing with my closest friends) for decades: Epstein once walked me into Donald Trump’s office at Trump Tower, where I was groped by Trump as Epstein stood by and watched. (Trump denies that this ever happened). For years I stayed silent in order to protect my privacy and my family. But with the release of a documentary in which I was featured, I felt I had to tell the truth. To support my account, I was polygraphed by a renowned examiner, my close friends were interviewed to corroborate that I had shared this story over the years, and Trump biographer Michael Wolff confirmed that Epstein disclosed the incident to him.

More recently, I have also shared something Epstein once told me over tea and Zabar’s walnut bread at his mansion: that he had video of me disrobed in a bedroom in his home. He described it as “the most beautiful thing” he had seen. That comment chilled me then, and it haunts me still. When I watched FBI agents raid Epstein’s homes in 2019, I grew nauseous at the thought that such videos could have ended up in the hands of other people.

Let me be clear: I did not consent to being groped by Donald Trump, and I did not consent to being filmed by Jeffrey Epstein. I am speaking out not because of politics, but because the American people – and Epstein’s many victims – deserve transparency.

This is not a partisan issue. Being a victim crosses party lines. That’s why I’ve been encouraged to see Representatives Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, and Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, from opposite sides of the aisle, standing besides Epstein’s victims on Capitol Hill, demanding the release of the Epstein files. Hundreds of women have lived in the shadow of this man’s crimes. They deserve truth, not secrecy.

Yet what we’ve seen is a game of political chicken. The Wall Street Journal reported that the attorney general, Pam Bondi, privately told Trump his name appears in Epstein-related files. The justice department’s second-in-command, Todd Blanche – Trump’s former lawyer – met behind closed doors not with victims, but with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein abuse underage girls. And despite public assurances that there is “nothing to see”, Congress recessed early rather than debate the issue. Maxwell, meanwhile, was quietly moved to a more comfortable minimum-security prison in Texas, despite the fact that she repeatedly deflected and minimized facts during her interview.

Two days ago, in a deceptive move supposedly intended to signal transparency, the House oversight committee released more than 33,000 files related to Epstein that it received from the justice department. As Representative Massie pointed out, 97% of those pages are “already in public domain”.

So here I am, like so many women in my position, mustering the courage to disclose and jumping through hoops to prove my truth – while perpetrators and enablers enjoy the benefit of secrecy. It is baffling that leaders from the president on down insist there is nothing to see, yet refuse to release the actual files. It is equally baffling to hear Alan Dershowitz deny that surveillance tapes exist, when testimony and evidence suggest otherwise. Maria Farmer, one of the first women to report Epstein and Maxwell for sexual crimes, told CBS News that Epstein had hidden cameras throughout his home. A recent New York Times report included images of video cameras inside Epstein’s mansion, even above his bed. And Epstein specifically boasted that he had video footage of me.

I know my pain is shared by countless survivors. I think of Virginia Giuffre, who tragically died by suicide this April, and of the retraumatization survivors endure as they watch Ghislaine Maxwell settle into a more comfortable facility while their stories remain buried. That is not justice.

We deserve peace of mind. We deserve healing that comes with accountability. And that will never come so long as our trauma is reduced to partisan warfare. Sexual violence and trafficking have no political party.

It is time to put politics aside, release the Epstein files and help free the women at the center of this tragedy from a nightmare that has lasted for decades.

Stacey Williams is a former model

************************************

Stacey Williams says Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein ‘coordinated’ groping incident. Former model said of incident at Trump Tower in 1993: ‘I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of twisted game’
by Jessica Glenza
The Guardian
Fri 25 Oct 2024 09.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... mp-epstein


Stacey Williams in October. Photograph: Marion Curtis/Starpix/Rex/Shutterstock

The former model Stacey Williams said she thought Donald Trump groped her to show off to her then boyfriend, the late financier and sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, when the couple dropped by to visit him in Trump Tower in New York in 1993.

In her first detailed, on-camera interview since discussing assault allegations with the Guardian, Williams late on Thursday told CNN that she recalled the former president and Epstein smiled at each other as the property mogul was feeling her up, which gave her the impression the entire incident was a “coordinated” game between the two men.

Her account comes just weeks before the presidential election, in which Trump and the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, are essentially tied, according to polls. Trump has denied Williams’s accounts.

“The second he was in front of me, he pulled me into him and his hands were just on me and didn’t come off,” Williams told CNN, echoing her account to the Guardian.

“Then the hands started moving on the side of my breasts, on my hips, back down to my butt, back up, sort of – they were just on me the whole time, and I froze,” she said.

Williams briefly dated Epstein in the 1990s. At the time, she told the Guardian, she and Epstein were walking through Manhattan when he suggested they visit Trump at his Trump Tower complex on Fifth Avenue.

The two were good friends, she said. Trump later distanced himself from Epstein after the financier was convicted of being a sex offender in Florida, several years before he was arrested in New York on federal sex offenses in 2019 and killed himself while in custody awaiting trial.

She added, as she did in her recounting to the Guardian, that she believed now that the incident was planned by Epstein and Trump all along. When they encountered Trump, she alleges he immediately grabbed and groped her, right in front of her boyfriend.

“This context made no sense because the hands were on me and he and Jeffrey just kept talking and looking at each other and smiling,” she said. Later, when the couple left, she said Epstein berated her for allowing Trump to touch her, and that the whole incident left her confused and sick.

“I just had this really sickening feeling that it was coordinated, I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of weird twisted game,” she told CNN. “I felt a wave of shame,” she said, and took the memory of the incident, “put it in a little box inside of me, turned the key, locked it.”

Williams told the Guardian this week in an exclusive first interview that she got the sense, at the time, that Trump and Epstein were “really, really good friends”. Williams also shared an undated postcard that she said Trump later sent her, with a view of Palm Beach, Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion.

“Your home away from home,” the postcard read. “Love, Donald”.

Trump’s campaign, responding to CNN, said Williams’s allegations were a “fake story [that] was contrived by Kamala Harris’ campaign,” to distract from a second incident, in which Doug Emhoff is accused of slapping a former girlfriend. A campaign spokesperson for Harris, the US vice-president, earlier this month denied the allegation against her husband.

Williams’s account will add to a long list of women who have accused Trump of sexual assault, ranging from the writer E Jean Carroll, who was eventually vindicated by a civil jury that found Trump liable for sexual abuse, to his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, who accused the former president of raping her, in a divorce deposition.

Williams said she gained the courage to come forward about the incident following the release of a recent documentary about the magazine Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issues, called Beyond the Gaze.

“I can’t control when a documentary comes out, I can’t control its premiering two weeks before the election,” Williams told CNN. Although Williams had alluded to the incident in social media comments, she had never told her story in detail until this week.

“It takes a lot of guts, and you have to really prepare yourself for that onslaught, and I’m ready now,” she said. “Just bring it.”

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Part 1 of 2

Sir James Goldsmith: Rich, Loud and Ignorant. Goldsmith’s Trap-Crap
by Gwydion M. Williams
1994-1997
https://gwydionwilliams.com/history-and ... -ignorant/

[I have no exact record of when I wrote this review of Goldsmith’s book The Trap. Some time between the book’s publication in 1994 and the death of Sir James Goldsmith in 1997. But most of what I said then remains relevant: general truths about the rise of the New Right and the shallow thinking behind it. And how a self-made millionaire can also be a ranting fool.]

-- Jeffrey Epstein, My Very, Very Sick Pal. A very weird interview with Stuart Pivar about Epstein, his science parties, his “pathology,” and the industrial scale of it all. by Leland Nally, Mother Jones, August 23, 2019

CHAPTER 11. THE RISE OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN

UNUSUAL BEGINNINGS

Jeffrey Epstein was born on January 20, 1953 to Paula (nee Stolofsky) and Seymour Epstein in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was a homemaker while his father was a groundskeeper for the New York Parks Department. His parents valued education, hoping that sending their sons – Jeffrey and Mark – to the right schools could be a "way out," or rather, a way up into a higher strata of New York society.1

Epstein was raised in the Lafayette neighborhood around Coney Island and attended Lafayette High School. In 1967, at age 14, he also attended the Interlochen Center for the Arts. He reportedly received a scholarship to Interlochen for his aptitude at playing the bassoon.2 As an adult, Epstein would later donate heavily to Interlochen, from 1990 to 2003, and used his connection to the school to recruit unwitting female teens with musical talents into his sex trafficking and sex blackmail enterprise. Epstein was even allowed to construct his own lodge at Interlochen, the Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge (now the Green Lake Lodge), before the school cut ties with him after his first conviction in 2007.3 Given his own early attendance and his subsequent return for nefarious purposes, some have suggested that Epstein himself may have been groomed at Interlochen.4

In 1969, two years after he attended Interlochen, Epstein graduated from Lafayette high school at age 16 after skipping two grades. Epstein then studied at Cooper Union, from the fall of 1969 through the spring semester of 1971. He attended New York University (NYU) from September 1971 to 1974, but never graduated. Per a 2002 profile in New York Magazine, Epstein had studied at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.5

During this period, Epstein claims to have backpacked across Europe with friends in 1971 and, while visiting London, met British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose patron was Queen Elizabeth II. Epstein would later claim to have played the piano for a du Pré performance during this visit and that, through her, he gained access to the British royals, ultimately leading to his close relationship with Prince Andrew, Duke of York.6 It’s unclear when du Pré would have made such an introduction, but it would have had to have occurred before her 1987 death. What does seem certain is that Epstein, during this trip, did befriend some British aristocrats as, a few short years later, he was seen at the New York mansion of British tycoon and corporate raider James Goldsmith.

It’s unclear how Epstein, while ostensibly backpacking, had come to make du Pré’s acquaintance, though du Pré did have ties to the Israeli and New York Jewish communities through her 1967 conversion to Judaism and subsequent marriage that same year to Daniel Barenboim, as well as her friendships with musicians Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zukerman. It’s possible that Epstein met du Pré through some mutual connection in these circles. Years later, Epstein would claim to have once been a concert pianist, with media reports from the early 1990s onwards referencing such claims.7 However, some who knew Epstein early in life, including his brother Mark, give little weight to Epstein’s claim to have been an accomplished pianist.8

In the latter half of 1974,, Epstein began working at the elite Dalton School, teaching mathematics and physics. He would remain with the school until 1976. There has been much disagreement in the mainstream press over who at Dalton was responsible for hiring Jeffrey Epstein. At the time Epstein began working at Dalton, the headmaster was Peter Branch. Branch, when contacted in 2019 by professor and author Thomas Volscho, did not recall hiring Epstein and was "relatively certain" that the previous headmaster, Donald Barr, or perhaps the head of the Math Department, had hired Epstein because "hiring decisions were typically made in the Spring."

Branch also noted that Barr "liked to hire unconventional teachers to enhance the educational experience for students at Dalton."9 Epstein certainly fell in the unconventional category, as he lacked the academic credentials to even teach at a public school in New York City. Vanity Fair later reported that Barr had hired other "gifted college dropouts," which would make his hire of Epstein not as much of an anomaly as some outlets have implied.10

Donald Barr was the son of an economist and psychologist who had joined the OSS during World War II. He is alleged to have been a member of an OSS "target team" in Germany and to have worked at a prisoner of war camp.11 His son, William Barr, would subsequently follow his father into the world of intelligence and served in the CIA from 1971 to 1977, which overlaps with the last few years his father was headmaster at the Dalton School – including the year Donald Barr is alleged to have hired Jeffrey Epstein. William Barr, whose alleged role in Iran-Contra was mentioned in Chapter 8, would go on to serve as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, and served in that capacity when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and found dead in a New York prison in 2019.

After exiting from US intelligence, Barr briefly worked as a literary editor and then went into academia. He taught English at Columbia for ten years while pursuing graduate studies. There, he started a series of conferences in 1955 focused on "the identification, guidance, and instruction of the gifted." Barr joined the School of Engineering the following year and these conferences then grew into the Science Honors program, which offered Saturday classes to gifted high schoolers.12 At the same time he was running this high school-focused program, Barr was also directing the Talent Preservation Project, "a massive research and therapy program for high school under-achievers." It is possible that there may have been an early Epstein-Barr connection if Epstein had attended one of these programs for gifted high school students.

Donald Barr would become headmaster of the Dalton School in 1964 and, a decade later, in 1974, Donald Barr would leave the school under a cloud of controversy, amid claims that he had meddled in the college admission prospects of prominent students, including the son of writer Betty Friedan. The Dalton parent who is credited with orchestrating Barr’s ouster was Richard Ravitch, a real estate magnate who served in several government-appointed positions related to housing during his career. Ravitch claimed that, by the end of his stint as headmaster, Barr was reviled by many Dalton teachers as well as parents.13

Soon after leaving his post as headmaster, Donald Barr published Space Relations, a bizarre science fiction novel that deals with power, drugs, and sex slavery, which has fueled speculation about Barr’s apparent decision to hire someone like Epstein and what the fantasy book implies about Barr’s own "extracurricular" interests.

During his time at Dalton, Jeffrey Epstein taught mostly seniors, ages 17 and 18. He also coached the math team, which competed locally and had a few notable victories under Epstein’s leadership. The school’s newspaper, The Daltonian, reported on March 5, 1976 that Epstein wanted to start a "math-track team" due to his "unique philosophy of integrating physical exercise with spiritual and mathematical stimulation." An earlier issue of the school paper refers to Epstein as "the ivory show man on the piano," again raising the running theme of Epstein’s alleged musical talents.14

Several Dalton alumni later told various media outlets in 2019 how Epstein attended student parties during his time as a Dalton teacher. One former student who graduated from Dalton in 1976, Scott Spizer, told the New York Times that Epstein was well known among students for the "persistent attention" he directed at teenage girls in the hallways and recalled that Epstein had attended a party where Dalton students were drinking. "I can remember thinking at the time 'This is wrong,’" Spizer later stated. A 1978 graduate of Dalton, Paul Grossman, also recalled Epstein attending student parties, stating that "it was weird" and that "everyone talked about it." A woman who attended Dalton during this period, but asked to remain anonymous, claimed that Epstein had "made multiple attempts to spend time with her away from school" and she also specifically recalled "reporting Epstein’s advances toward another female student to the school’s headmaster."15

The headmaster at that time, Peter Branch, did not mention such reports when he was interviewed in 2019 regarding Epstein’s time at the school. This may relate to the fact that several Dalton alumni who attended during this period asserted that student-teacher relationships at the school "were not unheard of," suggesting that Epstein’s alleged behavior was part of a larger problem, as opposed to an aberration.16 Branch has asserted that Epstein left the school following concerns from his colleagues in the math and science departments that his teaching skills had failed to improve over the previous year.17 "He was a young teacher who didn’t come up to snuff. So, ultimately, he was asked to leave," Branch was quoted as saying in late 2019.18

BEAR STEARNS AND THE BRONFMANS

After Epstein left the Dalton School in 1976, he went to work on Wall Street for Bear Stearns. There are two conflicting accounts of how he landed his first job there – as a junior assistant to a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. Both accounts intimately involve Alan "Ace" Greenberg, then a partner at Bear Stearns and who would become the bank’s CEO in roughly two years’ time, in 1978.

One account appears to have first been circulated in a 2002 profile on Epstein published by New York Magazine. Per that account, while still at the Dalton School, "So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point-blank: 'What are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be working on Wall Street – why don’t you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call.’"19 However, a year later, in the 2003 Vanity Fair profile penned by Vicky Ward, it is claimed that the connection with Greenberg was more direct, with Epstein tutoring Greenberg’s son who attended Dalton and also being "friendly" with one of his daughters.20 Both claims have been repeated by numerous mainstream and independent outlets over the years, though Greenberg’s daughter, Lynne Koeppel (nee Greenberg), has publicly backed the version of events as published in 2002 by New York Magazine.21 Yet, other sources cite Koeppel as having recommended Epstein to her father.22 Regardless of which account is closer to reality, it is agreed that Greenberg was ultimately the person who brought Epstein into Bear Stearns.

Once installed at the bank, Epstein’s ascent was rapid and he was mentored by both Greenberg and James Cayne, who had also been hired by Greenberg years prior. While he started off as a floor trader, he soon "began working with wealthy clients on bigger projects that sought an edge in esoteric markets."23 According to a former senior Bear Stearns executive interviewed by Fox Business, "Epstein’s accumulated knowledge of the U.S. tax codes – and how rich people can avoid taxes through various investments – made him one of Bear’s prized assets in its small, but specialized brokerage department." "He never went to college, but he knew everything about taxes. In fact, he could figure out just about anything if he studied it. The guy was a genius," the former executive was quoted as saying.24 Thanks to these talents, Epstein became a limited partner in relatively short order, by 1980. While working at the bank, he met his former girlfriend Paula Heil Fisher, now an opera producer.

Epstein abruptly left Bear Stearns in 1981. In the years before he became notorious, he claimed to have left because he wished "to run his own business." However, within the company, claims abounded that Epstein had been involved in a "technical infringement," with Epstein’s later associate, Steven Hoffenberg, claiming that Epstein had left the bank after he was caught performing "illegal operations." The former Bear Stearns executive interviewed by Fox Business claimed that Epstein had been asked to leave over "very serious stuff," which he insisted was related to "a significant expense account violation concerning an airline ticket that upper management was misled about."25 These claims were denied by Cayne and Epstein, while Greenberg said he was unable to recall the circumstances. In 2003, Cayne supported Epstein’s version of events, stating that he had left the bank of "his own volition" because he wanted to strike out on his own.

However, as noted by Vanity Fair, the SEC’s records of Epstein in 1981 tell a different story. Per those records, Epstein was interviewed, along with other Bear Stearns employees as part of an investigation into insider trading at the bank. The insider trading case revolved around a tender offer placed on March 11, 1981 for St. Joe Minerals Corp by the Bronfman-owned company Seagram Company Ltd. A handful of investors were ultimately found guilty of insider trading, including Giuseppe Tome, former head of overseas operations of Bache & Company and E.F. Hutton.

In Tome’s case, he was ordered to "disgorge," or hand over, $3.5 million in illegal profits related to the 1981 failed takeover attempt by Seagram in mid-1986. However, Tome left the US shortly after the SEC began its investigation and did not return to the country after the court’s decision, complicating the enforcement of the ruling against him.

The court claimed that Tome had "insinuated himself into the confidence of Seagram Co. Chairman Edgar M. Bronfman." However, a spokesperson for Bronfman declined to discuss his relationship with Tome and, in court testimony, Bronfman had admitted to discussing "Seagram’s secrets" with Tome because Tome counted with "20 years in this business … he ought to know the rules. I assume he does know the rules."

The Los Angeles Times described the Tome-Bronfman relationship in greater detail:

According to testimony in the case, Tome and Bronfman met in July, 1980. Bronfman was impressed with Tome’s financial acumen and within weeks had made him an unofficial adviser to Seagram, a major producer and marketer of spirits and wine, on foreign currency matters.

The two men also struck up a close personal friendship, and Bronfman opened a commodities account at Tome’s Geneva brokerage. The pair invested together in "Sophisticated Ladies," the Broadway show, and at one point Bronfman even covered a bounced check that Tome had issued to the show’s producers. The families vacationed together in Switzerland and the hunt country of Virginia.

Throughout this time, Bronfman was telling Tome of Seagram’s secret plans for major corporate acquisitions. Pollack’s order indicated that Tome used inside information to trade in stock and options of Texaco and Santa Fe, two tentative Seagram targets. (Those trades were not cited in the SEC lawsuit, however.) In some cases, testimony showed, Tome learned from Bronfman of Seagram’s plans even before its board of directors.

On March 9, 1981, Bronfman declined a dinner invitation from Tome, saying he had to visit Montreal for a board meeting. Tome concluded that a Seagram offer was imminent for St. Joe, which he knew as Bronfman’s next target."26

There is also the fact that Bronfman had considerable connections to Tome’s former employer Bache & Company, a company with ties to the OSS-organized crime networks previously discussed in chapter 1. For instance, the Loeb banking dynasty had intermarried into the family of Jules Bache of Bache & Company as well as into the Bronfmans, with Edgar Bronfman’s wife Ann being the daughter of John Loeb. Not only did the Bronfmans, Loebs, and Baches mingle through marriage, but the multi-million dollar holdings of all three families combined "to make up the largest single holding of stock in New York’s Empire Trust Company" – Edgar Bronfman had joined that company’s board in 1963.27

Notably, the Empire Trust Company, with Bronfman still intimately involved, announced a merger with the Bank of New York (BoNY) in 1968.28 Bronfman was placed on the board of the Bank of New York after the merger and remained there at least through 1975, if not later.29 As previously mentioned in chapter 9, BoNY essentially merged with the banking network of Bruce Rappaport by the 1980s and, by 1992, executives at the bank were found to be closely associated with Russian mobster and Robert Maxwell business associate Semion Mogilevich.

When the SEC investigation took place, Bronfman subsequently claimed to have no knowledge of insider trading by Tome and claimed that Tome, conveniently outside of the country and tried in absentia, lied to him about having been involved in illegal trades related to the attempted takeover of St. Joe’s. As the 1986 court case against Tome makes clear, Bronfman’s ties to Tome were considerable and he had a history of voluntarily supplying the man with Seagram’s "secret plans" before the company’s board even knew, as the Los Angeles Times had noted. It appears, from Tome’s case, that Bronfman seemed to have thought nothing of sharing "secret plans" with those outside the company and within his inner circle. Also of note is that Tome, and presumably others [LC: Jeffrey Epstein?] made insider trades on Texaco and Santa Fe, two tentative Seagram targets, and profited off those as well. However, the trades involving those companies were, for reasons still unclear, excluded from the SEC investigation.

Another figure sued in connection with insider trading as part of the failed Seagram takeover attempt was Dennis B. Levine, "a prominent mergers specialist with the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banking firm" who allegedly made $12.6 million in illegal profits from the deal.30 Drexel Burnham Lambert and many of its more infamous employees are mentioned throughout this book, as – at this time – Drexel was "corralling the majority of American [corporate] raiders."31

Dennis Levine was directly involved with many of these "raiders", specifically Ron Perelman, who dined with Epstein at Epstein’s home throughout the 2000s and whose political fundraiser for Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign was attended by Epstein in the mid-90s (see Chapter 16). Levine worked regularly with Perelman, serving as the "lead banker" for Perelman’s 1985 takeover of Revlon, which Levine called "the high point" of his career.32

In addition, Levine also played a key role in the hostile takeover of Crown Zellerbach by Sir James Goldsmith, a member of the Clermont Club mentioned in Chapter 4. Levine was intimately involved in Goldsmith’s 1984-1985 takeover of Crown Zellerbach. That takeover was actually the brainchild of Rothschild Inc. and its then-President Robert S. Pirie.33 Goldsmith was a longtime business associate of the Rothschilds and a distant cousin of the family.34

As will be mentioned again in chapter 15, Pirie and Rothschild Inc. were later the architects of Robert Maxwell’s takeover of Macmillan in 1989. By 1989, Maxwell and Goldsmith were closely associated, and Goldsmith would also later [LC: You mean, "sooner."] have his own ties to Jeffrey Epstein.35 Goldsmith apparently knew Epstein long before Epstein had started at Bear Stearns. According to a former friend of Epstein’s, art collector Stuart Pivar, he had first met Epstein at "Jimmy Goldsmith’s mansion" in the early 1970s. "There," Pivar later told Mother Jones, "there was somebody playing the piano with great virtuosity. And it was Jeffrey Epstein."36 Epstein’s ties to Goldsmith may have come through his daughter, Isabel Goldsmith, who has numerous telephone numbers and two addresses in Epstein’s "little black book" of contacts.37

In the context of this 1981 takeover attempt by Seagram, it is worth noting that Pirie’s soon-to-be "second in command," Gerald Goldsmith, was previously the executive vice president of E.F. Hutton, where Giuseppe Tome had also served in a top executive position. Goldsmith left to join the Rothschild bank in 1982.38 (There is no familial relationship between Gerald Goldsmith and James Goldsmith).

These networks that surrounded this SEC investigation would, after the fact, clearly intersect with Epstein’s own network within a few years’ time. This raises the possibility that this 1981 insider trading affair may have marked Epstein’s entry into these circles or may indicate that he had already developed connections there, as he was alleged to have been directly involved in such trades.

On March 12, 1981, a day after Seagram made the tender offer at the heart of this insider trading case, Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns. At some point in their investigation, the SEC was tipped off that Epstein knew something about relevant insider trades that had been made at Bear Stearns, and the SEC interviewed him on April 1st.

During that testimony, per SEC records, Epstein complained about how he had been disciplined for a possible "Reg D" violation where he was said to have lent money to a friend, who he later identified as Warren Eisenstein. Epstein had been questioned about the loan, per his recollection, on March 4th and, five days later, had been fined $2,500 by the bank. However, the SEC was mainly interested in the timing of Epstein’s exit from Bear Stearns and the Bronfman/Seagram-related insider trading. Epstein denied any connection and was never charged, but Vanity Fair noted that the SEC interviewers were skeptical of Epstein’s denials. Vanity Fair also noted that "if [Epstein] was such a big producer at Bear Stearns, [why would he] have given it up over a mere $2,500 fine."

It seems evident that the timing of Epstein’s "abrupt" departure and the Bronfman-related insider trades go a bit beyond mere coincidence. It certainly does seem unlikely that Epstein would abandon Bear Stearns over a relatively small fine (by the bank’s standards), unless he had received another offer of employment or if there was a risk that he would soon face greater, more costly problems at Bear Stearns.

Furthermore, given that Edgar Bronfman had been somewhat open about the plan for a Seagram takeover of St. Joe Mineral Corp., it is not outside the realm of possibility that those "rumors" would have made their way to Epstein. Epstein had become installed at Bear Stearns, and likely risen in its ranks so quickly, due to the patronage of Alan Greenberg, who was intimately involved in several of the same organizations as the Bronfmans, like the United Jewish Appeal and the Jerusalem Foundation (the latter was notably created by Teddy Kollek, see chapter 3). Like Greenberg, the Bronfmans also donated heavily to those same groups in addition to being closely involved in their affairs. Greenberg also, at some point, saw his philanthropic efforts intersect closely with those of Charles Bronfman, per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.39

Had Greenberg potentially been informed by a loose-lipped Edgar Bronfman, just as Giuseppe Tome had been, and passed this along to one of his "protégés" at Bear Stearns, Jeffrey Epstein? Or had Epstein, a protégé of Greenberg’s, been advising Bronfman on behalf of the bank? After all, Epstein was said to have worked "with wealthy clients on bigger projects that sought an edge in esoteric markets," and Bronfman could have been such a client.40

If so, it may have prompted Epstein’s "abrupt" resignation, not so much to protect a young Epstein, but potentially to protect Greenberg, who had – by then – risen to become Bear Stearns’s CEO. Greenberg being ensnared in the SEC’s investigation would have been a much bigger headache for the bank than Epstein – now, a former limited partner in the bank.

In addition, given the networks of both Giuseppe Tome and Danny Levine at this time, and how Epstein would become a fixture in those networks in short order, it may be possible that Epstein’s abrupt resignation was part of an effort not just to shield Greenberg, but the full extent of these particular networks in this 1981 insider trading scheme, which was considerably larger than the select components that the SEC had chosen to investigate.

If Epstein was advised to leave due to potential legal concerns, it is worth mentioning that, as noted in Chapter 6, Bear Stearns was represented by the law firm Rogers & Wells and, from 1976 to 1981, was specifically a client of William Casey. Though Casey likely wasn’t involved in this particular situation, given that he had become CIA director several weeks before the tender offer, it is worth reminding the reader that Casey’s influence is another potential factor to consider when examining this situation as well as Epstein’s activities immediately after leaving the bank.

THE FINANCIAL MERCENARY AND INTELLIGENCE ASSET

After leaving Bear Stearns, Epstein would later claim that he went on to manage "money only for billionaires," telling Vicky Ward in 2003 that "I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more."41 However, it appears that there was much more to the story, as the details of Epstein’s life, from his 1981 exit from Bear Stearns until around 1986, are murky at best. The details that are known about Epstein during this period point to something considerably different than Epstein’s own account of his activities at this time. This is particularly obvious when one considers that his formal role as a money manager did not appear to begin until 1988, when he founded J. Epstein & Co.42

Throughout the 1980s, Epstein’s main company was called Intercontinental Assets Group, which was incorporated in 1981.43 Apart from that, little about the company is known. However, there is little indication he used the company to manage billionaire wealth, as the existing evidence about his life during this decade points in another direction.

After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, a former friend of Epstein’s, Jesse Kornbluth, stated that Epstein had claimed to be a "bounty hunter" for the rich and powerful:

When we met in 1986, Epstein’s double identity intrigued me – he said he didn’t just manage money for clients with mega-fortunes, he was also a high-level bounty hunter. Sometimes, he told me, he worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators. Other times those dictators hired him to help them hide their stolen money.44


Actress Anna Obregón later stated that she had hired Epstein, who mentioned his company Intercontinental Assets Group, to help her father, Madrid-based real estate magnate Antonio García Férnandez. García Férnandez had been one of several powerful Spanish individuals, which included members of the Spanish royal family, who had invested in Drysdale Government Securities, which collapsed due to fraud in 1982. Epstein had been hired by Obregón to "recover" money from the Drysdale collapse on behalf of her father, according to James Patterson’s book Filthy Rich.45

Similar claims also surfaced in [url=X]Vicky Ward’s 2003 profile of Epstein in Vanity Fair.[/url] Ward wrote that: "A few of the handful of current friends who have known him since the early 1980s recall that he used to tell them he was a 'bounty hunter,’ recovering lost or stolen money for the government or for very rich people. He has a license to carry a firearm."46

-- One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, by Whitney Webb

With so much of the world’s true wealth being sacrificed to the idols of Free Trade, I hesitate to criticise anyone who is making a stand against GATT and similar anti-social reforms. And James Goldsmith has certainly been a powerful voice raised in opposition. So I would like to find reasons to praise him.

On the other hand, I had got a good idea of Goldsmith’s broad outlook before I even looked at his ventures into politics with anti-GATT and The Trap. Over a number of years I had been making a general study of him and a few other tycoons, trying to find out what they had in common. The first thing I found was that the successful tycoon needs to be both clever and unreasonably lucky – the one in a thousand gambler who walks off with a big win. The fact that many try and only a few succeed does not mean that those few particularly deserved it.

Secondly, I found them falling into two distinct groups. Some, like James Watt or Bill Gates, grow rich by giving the public something useful. Others grew rich by merely working the structures of law, money and power to their own benefit. And this is definitely where one should place Goldsmith.

Thirdly, some of the tycoons feel that their great wealth gives them social responsibilities, whereas others deny this. Goldsmith, unlike even such gifted monstrous characters as Ford or Carnegie or Getty, has absolutely no concept of general social responsibility. Long before Thatcher, he was loudly denouncing the idea that industry and commerce should exist for any other purpose than making money for shareholders.

“Although corporations belong to their shareholders,’ he wrote not long afterwards in the Wall Street Journal, ‘corporate managements sometimes believe that the business that employs them has become an institution and that they are the trustees of that institution. Some believe that they have developed some sort of proprietorial rights. Shareholders then become no more than an inconvenience.”

Goldsmith’s ideal is for shareholders to be able treat the rest of the society as an inconvenience.

The ‘corporatism’ of the 1950s was more successful than anything before or since. It kept some sort of balance between the rival class interests, stopped societies from turning to drastic alternatives like Fascism or Communism. It accepted what Goldsmith strongly rejects – the ‘stakeholder’ principle, the notion that you take your profit only after taking care of all of your traditional obligations. Stakeholder or corporate societies are not utopian, but they work well enough, better than anything seen before or since. Britain was the first industrial society, and it emerged after it had destroyed many of the ‘stakeholder’ elements in its own society. This might mean that ‘stakeholder’ ideas are a burden – except that every subsequent industrialisation has had more stakeholder elements and has produced a more efficient and faster growing system than Britain’s.

The concept of a British ‘decline’ after 19th century greatness is an illusion. Looked at in isolation, Britain had continued to grow quite smoothly, and was in fact at its best in the period 1950 to 1975. It was just that the rest of the world was no longer standing still, and was in fact growing very much faster than Britain had ever managed.

Britain’s best period coincided with an even better period for the rest of Europe, leading to a wholly false notion that Britain had somehow lost the secret of its former greatness. Corporatism was seen as being to blame – whereas in fact Britain would have been far worse off if it had carried on with classic capitalism. Corporatism was in fact the best available option, but too few people knew it at the time. And the ‘shareholder’s revolt’ led by people like Goldsmith has produced a truly revolting alternative!

***

Goldsmith’s notion of a ‘trap’ springs from the same financier / accountant viewpoint that has been so bad for British industry. If life was about nothing but money, then cutting wages would indeed be always good for industry, and the society with the lowest wages would put everyone else out of business. But life is not about money. Money determines the distribution of wealth within a society, obviously. But its role in determining overall prosperity is another matter.

“Economists know surprisingly little about the causes of economic growth. Although fast-growing countries have many things in common, economists do not know which of these actually cause growth and which are simply byproducts of it.” (The Economist, September 30th 1995, p 132).

This interesting insight is of course buried in the highly technical Finance and Economics section. Facts that are well known when it comes to advising the rich on investment possibilities have no influence on the loud-mouthed main-editorial view that growth comes from letting the money men do just as they please.

In my view, money is meaningful only because it reflects the overall wealth of the society. It is a convenient means of distribution and control. But ‘making money’ is not at all the same thing as making wealth for the common benefit.

When England first grew as an industrial nation in the 18th century, wages for ordinary labourers kept pace with the rising prosperity. The sudden sharp decline that occurred with widespread mechanisation and de-skilling was certainly very nice for a burgeoning class of factory-owners. Not so good for the society as a whole. Quite horrible for all of the small property owners and craftspeople, who found themselves wiped out by social movements as arbitrary and beyond their control as earthquakes or volcanoes.

These events were not outside of the control of the ruling class. Few people were against change as such – they just objected when it was for someone else’s benefit and at their expense. The simple action of accepting existing skilled production or small-scale distribution as a form of property would have ensured gentler and less disruptive changes. Social controls were strictly enforced where the interests of rich well-connected people were involved – a fortune was paid to wealthy landowners for allowing railways to be run across their land, for instance. But when the ‘small men’ asked that their own skills and social position be treated as a form of property not subject to arbitrary confiscation, this viewpoint was mostly ignored.

Some people call the brutal extinction of traditional social forms part of the ‘price of progress’. I am far from sure it was. Since we today are a population of people who were produced by the breakdown of eighteenth century forms, we may perhaps decide that the changes were a Good Thing. But that is quite different from saying that they were necessary or that some other pattern of development might not also have worked.

Victorian industry seemed amazing because it was the only industrial society in the whole world. But by modern standards it was a decidedly sluggish and unsuccessful economy, growing about half as fast as Britain did in the ‘disastrous’ post-1945 years. Letting the poor sink to the lowest sustainable level of misery served the immediate interest of the rich. It saved them the direct expense that would have come with social responsibility. But this callous self-righteous greed also ensured that Britain would not in the long run retain its early advantage.

During the 19th century, America matched and then surpassed Great Britain – but not by being a poor low-wage economy. American wage-rates were in fact about double the British equivalent. American culture valued labour as well as private enterprise – hence institutions like ‘Labour Day’, celebrated since 1895 an American public holiday. Unlike May Day, Labour Day involved the whole of the society celebrating the importance of skilled work. This no longer really holds, unfortunately, with the Republicans having become an American Tory Party and money becoming the only social value. But in the days when the USA was going up in the world, high wages and respect for ordinary workers was part of the mix.

Germany was another case that shows just how wrong Goldsmith is. Germany under Bismark became an industrial giant while giving the working class an unprecedented package of welfare and social security. And Japan during its rise to greatness gave its ordinary employees rights and security that Western experts regarded as ruinous. The issues are complex, and there may be some short-term advantages in wage cutting. But the most common pattern found over the past couple of centuries is for the society with the highest wages to be ruining everyone else.

Britain’s best ever period for growth was the 1950s and 1960s, when wages were growing unprecedentedly fast. Britain back then was averaging 2.5% annual growth, better than anything that Thatcher or Major have managed, and more than twice as good as the ‘good old days’ of Victorian Britain. Victorian industry was slow and chaotic by modern standards: it looked impressive only in a world when any sort of industrial society was a startling novelty.

If it were low wages that made foreign competition dangerous, the main threat would be coming from Africa rather than East Asia. But wages are usually a minor factor, and only an incompetent management or managerial class will be wanting to lower them. Any idiot boss can grow rich by squeezing money out of their poor and vulnerable fellow-citizens. A good industrialist will do exactly the reverse.

Henry Ford swept the board with his Model-T small motor-cars while paying his workers twice the going rate for American industry, itself generous compared to Britain. And all of the successful Asian societies have been careful to look after their working mainstream, however unfair or unreasonable they may have been in other ways.

Japan has prospered because it had a more productive and successful system of human relationships in industry. There was much less of a them-and-us culture than in Britain. There was sensible central state direction. And there was a business culture that normally prevented characters like Goldsmith from messing up productive industries with complex money games that benefited only themselves.

Very few people see their own way of life as wrong. Al Capone didn’t – he did genuinely see himself as a splendid fellow providing a useful public service. How much the more complacent must Goldsmith feel about his own activities, which are after all quite legal, and highly applauded in some circles. One suspects that even Private Eye would have found nothing to complain about if exactly the same career of high-stake gambling had been pursued by one of their friends. So although Goldsmith is highly symptomatic of what’s wrong with Britain – as are Private Eye, in their own way – he must find some other sort of person to dump the blame on.

It is hard to go on condemning the unions after their visible loss of power. Hard to blame management for not being subservient enough to shareholder interests, since all of them have learned that lesson, and also discovered the benefits of share options. Quite impossible after the events of the last few years to keep declaiming that the Soviet Union is a new Rome destined to destroy the free-trading Western ‘Carthage’. Someone else must be found to be very guilty indeed of all of the failings that Goldsmith and similar financial games-players cannot possibly be responsible for. East Asia and the European Union makes logical and a popular targets.

***

Sir James Goldsmith is a turkey campaigning for an early Christmas. He has done very well for himself in the peaceful tolerant and prosperous Europe of the last few decades. But he’s a businessman, accustomed to focus very narrowly on his own immediate concerns, ignorant of other forms of human activity. He doesn’t understand that this favourable environment is both artificial and vulnerable. The product of much care and idealism. A deliberately crafted alternative to the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. All he can see is the expense. He mistakes the price of civilisation for a wasteful frivolity.

His recent literary offering, The Trap, looks more like an overgrown interview than a book. He may be a financial genius, but he is a bigoted fool about everything else. He amply demonstrates that you don’t have to be smart to get rich: just skilful and lucky in the complex games that make up the modern financial world.

The man has no intellectual depths, and not even very much to say. The Trap uses big print to weigh in at just over 200 pages. Much of this is a tedious rant on food hygiene and nuclear safety, subjects that have already been well covered by many other writers. Apart from this, one has some semblance of a political philosophy, a right-wing protest at current developments in Europe. But though his political thinking is weak and muddled, Goldsmith has to be taken seriously. He is a notable representative of a small but growing force on the French Right, perhaps a worse menace than the obvious malice of Le Pen. If things get bad, politics might go almost any way, including Goldsmith’s way. And he is now trying the same stunt over here, offering to field his own candidates in the next election. He may not do any better than the ‘natural law party’, who were at least nice in their eccentricity. But in the current political uncertainly, someone with Goldsmith’s money and brash self-confidence cannot be written off as marginal.

The European Union is not safe or stable. It must keep going forward, or else perhaps die. The Maastricht framework is necessary to keep the divergent national interests within reasonable bounds.

The rapid slide of Yugoslavia from peaceful prosperity into a war-zone shows just how fast things can fall apart. Central controlling power may seem like a burden and an intrusion – but just see what happens when it is not there! James Goldsmith should be all for Maastricht and welfarism. Instead he has a dogmatic right-wing hatred for both. He even engages in some nasty ranting against non-white immigrants.

The Goldsmith family were originally Goldschmidts from Frankfurt. His father Frank Goldsmith seemed to have integrated perfectly, getting elected as an English MP while still quite a young man. But he was caught by the hysterical anti-German feeling of World War One, and rapidly lost his position and trust. Much as happened in the same period to the Battenbergs, now Mountbattens, despite their royal connections. The less-well-connected Frank Goldsmith found it necessary to abandon England and start a new career as a hotel manager in France.

Having had to flee England in World War One because of their German origin, the Goldsmiths had to flee back there in World War Two because they were Jews. All of which should have given Sir James some sensitivity to the plight of the displaced and dispossessed. But it does not. Empathy is perhaps not his strong point. Nor does he show the least inkling of the dangerous nature of the forces he is trying to stir up.

‘Britishness’ is a concept developed in the 16th century by courtiers and thinkers of Welsh origin, who had risen within the English state as followers of the part-Welsh Tudor dynasty. Wales was legally and administratively swallowed up by England in the Middle Ages. But then one had the unexpected rise of the Tudor family to the English throne, after most other candidates had killed each other off in the Wars of the Roses.

The Welsh families who followed the Tudors did not question that England had successfully swallowed their nation. There was too much brute power in the matter to make it a sensible topic for debate. But they also wished to keep their own identity. So they revived the Roman concept of ‘Britannia’. The same concept was used again by James the Sixth of Scotland when he became James the First of England. He reckoned himself the ruler of ‘Great Britain’, though a formal union took a lot longer. There were many conflicts between ‘North Briton’ and ‘South Briton’. And even the radical libertarian anti-establishment politics of John Wilkes included a strong and disgraceful element of anti-Scotch bigotry.

Despite this, Britishness was a wide concept that could include a great many diverse peoples. But in times of stress, the definition of ‘Britishness’ could also be drastically contracted, as Frank Goldsmith found.

The fact that Britain is relatively tolerant at this present time does not mean that it will always remain so. A strong reassertion of purely English bigotry is a danger that any sensible person would want to guard against. Sir James Goldsmith is very definitely not a sensible person.

Hostility to one sort of ‘foreigner’ can easily get extended beyond what the original leader wants. The political career of John Wilkes was effectively ended by the Gordon Riots of 1780. In part, the rioters were supporting the rebellious American colonies. The whole struggle for American independence was referred to as the Civil War by many of Wilkes’s supporters, heirs to the Cromwellian tradition. At one level the Gordon Riots were a fine protest for simple democracy, and the rioters’ destruction of Newgate Prison foreshadowing the later fall of the Bastille. But the Gordon Riot was also disfigured by a vicious anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigotry. Many of Wilkes’s supporters were also heirs to the Cromwellian tradition in their view of Irish Catholics. Wilkes himself felt obliged to help suppress rioting crowds who included many who had voted for him across the years. And Edmund Burke, a target of the rioters even though he was officially Church of England, probably gained his mistrust of the ‘swinish multitude’ at this time.

The whole mess was a foreseeable result of Wilkes unwisely deciding to make use of anti-Scotch bigotry to get at his anti-democratic Scottish foes. It set back progressive politics and delayed Catholic emancipation for maybe a couple of generations. It as probably the reason why Catholic Ireland became fervent supporters of Papal Power instead of joining the radical ‘Celtic Fringe’. Yet could easily have been far worse. There were some little-documented struggles within Radicalism over the next couple of generations.

It was by no means a foregone conclusion that religious and national bigotry would be definitely pushed out of the popular movement for democracy. In the USA it never really was. Populism blends easily into racism and right-wing Christian extremism, which is why US politics remain such a mess and keeps throwing up characters like Buchanan. Even over here, the radical-right viewpoint has never been totally excluded, though there have been no more set-backs like the Gordon Riots.

***

In the world of today, the European Union offers a way of ending the bitterness of centuries. A way to end the interminable conflict of nation-states and the persecution of inconvenient minorities. But a viable Europe would have to be a Europe based on all of its present inhabitants, without engaging in the dangerous game of trying to decide which portion of the present population really belongs.

According to Goldsmith, “The principle purpose of Europe’s defence must be to protect Europe’s vital interests… to defend its territory against military or uncontrolled invasion”. (The Trap, p 71.) Asked what he means by ‘uncontrolled invasion’, he says ‘I mean immigration on a scale which cannot be integrated.’ Which is quite different from illegal immigration, and a rather dangerous principle to float. Adolf Hitler when he began to drive out the Jews could have said with great sincerity that he was merely dealing with people who could not be integrated.

The encouragement of mass Commonwealth immigration to Britain in the 1950s was foolish, a crazy policy based on false expectations of a labour shortage. But it was an error made by the whole society. Characters like Enoch Powell suppose that we can somehow push out people who came here quite legally and in accordance with government policies. This is simply unjust, and also foolish, since it could not be done by any method that even someone like Powell could stomach. Powell has talked vaguely of ‘voluntary repatriation’, which is politically meaningless. British law does not prevent any of its existing inhabitants from going off somewhere else, but very few of Britain’s black minority wish to leave. Some of the untroublesome older people may chose to retire to the land of their birth. But the British-born youngsters have been very effectively incorporated into British society. Short of some Bosnia-style ‘ethnic cleansing’, they are no more likely to depart than any other portion of the society.

People who are legally and actually part of Britishness have to be accommodated somehow. Most of the non-white population is British-born and unlikely to fit in anywhere else. And many of the original arrivals already possessed substantial long-standing connections with Britain. Connections through the Imperial structures which gave London its current standing as a world financial standing. Whatever people say, there is black in the Union Jack.

The eighteenth century prosperity that allowed Britain to launch modern industrial society was built on imperial wealth. Bombay, Madrid and Calcutta were shaped by Britain’s gradual incorporation of the sub-continent into its Empire. The West Indies were even more a British creation. The original American Indian populations had been wiped out by the Spaniards: something totally new was created by Western Europe’s demand for tropical products, especially sugar. The English-speaking islands are societies that Britain invented from scratch, with much of the population intentionally placed there as slaves or indentured workers. To now pretend that they have nothing to do with us is ridiculous, unjust and unworkable.

There are many ways to define British or American identities. Some would exclude people of Irish origin or Jewish origin or anyone with a darker skin. Others would exclude just Jewish and Black – the concept of Anglo-Celtic is presently quite popular in the USA. And there are those – including some right-wing Jews – who hope to limit the exclusion to just Blacks. Goldsmith gives every sign of holding to this last opinion. He sees the United States as being threatened because soon “the average US resident, as defined by census statistics, will trace his or her descent to Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific islands, Arabia – almost anywhere but white Europe.” (Ibid, p 61.) Of course the typical defenders of ‘white Europe’ also have a way of being anti-Jewish. [Which is one of several reasons why they have achieved very little beyond hooliganism.]

Goldsmith may suppose that he can whip up fear, hatred and chauvinism without it ever getting beyond what he would see as its proper boundaries. Wilkes may have felt the same, in his heyday.

The USA decided from the very start to define itself by citizenship, not race or religion. A certain amount of cultural assimilation was required for the foreign-born: that was all. There was of course a strong unofficial bias towards both Christians and North Europeans. Few were so racist as to entirely exclude Hispanics from the category of ‘white Europe’, as Goldsmith does. The big and still unresolved problem was the descendants of the black slaves who were brought in because they were much more profitable than free white labour.

Afro-Americans have always been placed at the very bottom of every hierarchy. They were never truly allowed to be part of the society. The brief attempt at inclusion in the 1960s seems to have failed. People who could not stomach open racial segregation also balked at the costs and problems of true integration. Afro-Americans were left half in and half out of the society.

The Republican Party are now taking over the American South by irresponsibly tapping deep reservoirs of racism. Unlike the old-time Democrats, they do not offer a serious schema for a racist society. Unlike the present-day Democrats, and unlike the Nationalist Party in South Africa, they do not recognise that the racist game is up and that serious reforms are needed for long-term stability. The ‘conservative’ Republicans make use of racists and seem to care nothing for the long-term results.

Anglo-Celtic America needs to be told that that the present set-up is unjust and unworkable. But Goldsmith’s remarks on President Madison endorse the exclusion of America’s Black minority.

“James Madison … though he himself was a slave owner, he believed in emancipation. But he understood that the slaves had been stripped of their culture and that they would be excluded from, or would reject, the prevalent white culture… Prior to the arrival of African Americans, America’s immigrant population seemed likely to develop into a nation… They commingled with ease… Obviously, for all the reasons foreseen by Madison, the relations between African and European Americans was very much more difficult.” (Ibid, 57 – 59).

To say ‘would be excluded from, or would reject’ is remarkably mealy-mouthed. Black separatism has usually been a marginal force. It was only ever an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. Black Americans tried for a very long time to be what the rest of the society wanted them to be. The trouble was, the rest of the society mostly wanted them not to be black. Most white Americans just would not accept a full common identity with people of a darker skin-colour, no matter how similar their culture. Whole waves of Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans had been absorbed with remarkably little fuss. But faith in the American ‘melting pot’ faded away very rapidly when the Civil Rights movement established that Afro-Americans would have be a part of it.

Black American culture is the most purely and specifically American of all the elements in US life. Links with Black Africa are mostly forgotten, playing a smaller role than Greek or Roman legacies play in English identity. Also Black Africa contained peoples as different from each other as Danes, Poles, French, Germans and English. The slaves took their culture from their owners, and developed it in response to what the society expected of them. They also succumbed to commercialisation faster than other peoples who had more confidence in their origins and more status within the society. But though Afro-Americans were always moving in tune with the society, anticipating some trends, originated almost all of the music that America then spread to the rest of the world, they were always kept at a distance.

The US Constitution was based on abstractions. It ignored the national and religious and racial distinctions that had been normal in all previous republics. Though implicitly accepting some sort of Creator, it says nothing definite about either God or Religion. All it does is to make it illegal for any particular religion to be established as the foundation of the state.

That was the theory. The vast numerical preponderance of Protestant Christians gave a very definite character to the society. The Constitution defined it as ‘Abstract-land’, but in practice it was ‘WASP-land’, a new nation created by and for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The presence of Jews was accepted, as it had been in the countries the settlers had come from. Yet Jews were not quite seen as full members of the community, despite theoretical legal equality. They were perhaps one rung down from WASPS, certainly well above Mexicans or Blacks, not targeted for genocide like the Red Indians, but also not quite equal.

Jews in the USA mostly shared the prejudices of their neighbours. Southern Jews quoted Hebrew scriptures that justified slavery. Northern Jews supported emancipation but not integration. Jews used blacks as convenient cheap labour just like everyone else. Groups like the Quakers had their own distinctive agenda, helping escaped slaves and treating the native Americans as fellow-humans. But the majority of Jews accepted the prejudices of their neighbours on all matters except their own status as Jews. Much the same was also true in Britain, and seems not be extinct even today. Since mainstream Toryism has been seriously opposed to anti-Semitism in a way that present-day Republicanism is not, Jews tend to be distributed right across the political spectrum. Sir Keith Joseph was Thatcher’s teacher and mentor. British Jews “are politically more right-wing than the general population but when allowances are made for social class, Jews of all religious affiliations are found to be well to the left of gentiles in the same profession.” (The Independent, 15th February 1996.) Also “Jews believe that racism has increased more over the last five years than anti-Semitism”. But that has been after a fairly minor economic crisis, in which many are stressed but few are desperate. The fact that British Jews are less inclined to share to smug greed of English middle-class professionals indicates that memory lingers still.

[admin]

Part 2 of 2

***

Modern Cosmopolitanism was invented by West Europeans whose ancestors would have been Christian for more than a thousand years, and pagans before that. (As were mine, though my own direct ancestors would still have been submerged in the peasantry back then.) By the 18th century, the educated classes had had quite enough of conventional Christianity. The horrors done in the name of the Bible during the Wars of Religion discredited the existing sources of spiritual authority. They looked to make a new and rational world in which they hoped such things could not happen again.

Educated people turned to pure reason, because ‘spirituality’ as actually practised in Western Europe had been so thoroughly disastrous.

The Enlightenment was a covert rejection of popular faith by most of the rulers and thinkers. Some were ‘Latitudinarian’, believing that Christianity had been originally an Enlightened creed that had somehow been distorted over the centuries. This view had as good a justification as the more popular Puritan or Roman Catholic interpretations. All three creeds could make use of some parts of the Bible while being obliged to distort or ignore much else. But the Enlightenment also included the more logical and subversive creed of Deism, which believed in a creator-God but denied any special status to Jesus or to the ‘Holy Scriptures’.

From either a Latitudinarian or a Deist viewpoint, Jews settling in Britain were not a problem. Even from a serious Protestant viewpoint it made sense, since Jews had been viciously persecuted by England’s old enemy Spain. A Jewish presence in England was officially authorised under Cromwell, following a very serious debate as to whether the Mediaeval prohibition against them should be lifted. The advice of the legal experts was that there was no actual law preventing Jews from settling in England. The original expulsion had been done by the authority of the Crown without any specific Act of Parliament. Cromwell as the inheritor of Royal power was quite entitled to take a different view of the matter. And since Charles the Second chose to take the same view, it ceased to be much of an issueJews in Britain had a place similar to some of the less conventional Nonconformist groups. The dominant Church of England viewpoint often lumped them all together. In Smollet’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, it is said of one of the characters that “though she is a violent church-woman… I believe in my conscience she would have no objection, at present, to treat on the score of matrimony with an Anabaptist, Quaker, or Jew, and even ratify the treaty with her own conversion.”

Real-life conversions did occur, and caused no particular stir. When Lord Gordon who had caused the Gordon riots with his Protestant zeal later converted to an obscure and unrespectable sect of Judaism, this was seen as just another oddity from a very odd man.

Jews fitted in nicely on the fringes of British life, only gradually gaining full citizenship as the privileges of the Church of England were slowly eroded. Both Jews and Nonconformists would pioneer new methods and create new trade connections, and might become very wealthy. Neither group had full political rights, which were originally confined to people who were at least nominally members of the Church of England. Conversion and assimilation were welcomed, but not required or imposed. Both individual Jews and individual Nonconformists might well switch to the Church of England as they grew wealthy and moved up the social ladder. But in both groups, there were also notable and determined hold-outs.

It was only quite late in the 19th century that all religious restrictions in British political life were swept away. This was done first for Nonconformists, whose basic loyalty to the state was felt to be secure after 1688. Rather more slowly for Catholics, who were being officially urged to treason by the Church Hierarchy. Last of all for Jews, even though they had always passively accepted whatever state structure they found themselves under, because the official basis of the state remained Christian.

Jews were in fact accommodated under a set of reforms that removed all religious requirements – reforms that were mostly of benefit to ex-Christians who disliked having to pretend to beliefs they had long abandoned. It would have been quite possible to draw up a list of ‘acceptable’ creeds or religions, requiring people in public life to adhere to one or other of them. Just as legislation to impose the strict Protestant interpretation of what was acceptable on Sunday did make provision for Jews keeping their Sabbath instead. But what actually happened was that everyone without exception was released from any particular religious obligation, with religion turned into a personal matter. Formally speaking the state remains Anglican, with the proviso that the monarch must be a member of the Church of England, the church of which he or she remains the titular head. By the same logic, the Anglican bishops sit in the House of Lords. But for all practical purposes, the state is now secular. The Enlightenment or Cosmopolitical world view was happy to let Europe’s Jews exist as a distinct community, not excluded and not unreasonably pressured to give up their separate identity. So successful was this policy, and so successful were individual Jews at flourishing within this framework, that there has been a false and highly confusing identification of Judaism and the Cosmopolitical world view.

The totally indigenous nature of the Enlightenment gets overlooked. The only significant Jewish input was the philosophical ideas of Spinoza. And Baruch Spinoza had an historic importance only because a few Enlightenment thinkers chose to take notice of him after his own Jewish community had expelled him as a heretic.

The version of Judaism that developed after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem was a moderate and a modest religion. But in no sense was it Cosmopolitan. It remained politely outside the Cosmopolitical schemes of the later Roman Emperors, just as it had with the earlier Hellenistic empires. Whereas both Christians and Muslims wished ideally to include the entire human race within their own creed, Jews wished mostly to continue just as they were.

In the 19th century, Enlightenment ideas had become the norm – even the Holy Alliance was a reactionary expression of those same values. Jews adapted to the new environment, just as they had always previously taken account of the twists and turns of whatever society they were operating within. But Jewish and Christian mental worlds had been essentially separate throughout the centuries when the peoples were physically intermingled, keeping up most of the barriers that had been erected when Christianity separated itself from Judaism within the pagan Roman Empire.

When Jews and Christians co-existed in mediaeval Europe, there was little cross-over. A work of Jewish theology that pondered the nature of God got accidentally included among the acceptable books of mediaeval Catholicism. Protestants looked to Jewish versions of the Hebrew Bible to get rid of textual corruptions. But the essential separateness remained. It was the Enlightenment framework that gave scope for Jews become part of a common Cosmopolitical framework of European thought.

During the 19th century, there were many and notable contributions to the continuing Enlightenment by Jews or by persons of Jewish origin. And a certain confusion grew up as to where these ideas had originally come from. Cosmopolitical ideas came to be identified as Jewish, which is simply untrue. This view was mostly associated with right-wing Catholicism, keen to identify the revolt against its own power as having alien roots, not a natural result of its own mismanagement and cynical power-politics.

The Enlightenment was entirely a revolt within the framework of Christian society. Jews took little part in it, not until after it had become the European norm. Voltaire and Diderot were both educated by Jesuits. Their British equivalents came from strongly Protestant tradition, the heirs of Cromwell, the people who had gone looking for truth in the Bible in protest against Rome’s excessive claims. Unfortunately, it turned out that while the actual text of the Bible discredited many Catholic traditions, it didn’t really justify Protestantism either. Devout Protestants and educated Catholics both found themselves faced with popular beliefs that they could not easily change but did not have much regard for. Both groups found themselves converging on a ‘Enlightened’ viewpoint, a decision that none of the established forms of Christianity could be considered either true or worthy of preservation.

***

I said earlier that Jews and the less conventional Nonconformists tended to be lumped together in the eyes of the Church of England mainstream. But in their own eyes, there was a very great difference. Jews continued to see themselves as ‘strangers in a strange land’. They might keep themselves separate from the rest of the society. Or they might try to integrate with it. But they had very little notion of trying to alter it.

Nonconformists were something quite different, strangers in their own land. Survivals of the alternative vision of Britishness that had overthrown Charles the First in the Civil War and yet somehow failed to consolidate itself under Cromwell. A hold-out against the Enlightenment view that the Bible was not the place to go looking for truth. They certainly never saw their defeat as final. Nor were they worried at whom they might upset or enrage, just so long as they were righteous in their own eyes.

Nonconformists in Britain and America pioneered a disruptive unprecedented and unpopular industrialism. They continued to struggle with the gentry for control of the levers of political and social power. They provided a disproportionate number of both the early capitalists and the early radical democrats.

Regarding Socialism, I think that Marx was the first person of Jewish origin to make a substantial contribution to a system of thought that had been growing within Europe for decades. And this was only because he was highly assimilated, the son of a convert to Protestantism, not at all comfortable with his Jewishness. He made his own enormous contributions to human thought within what was already a strong and growing political movement.

In as far as modern socialism can be given a specific origin, it begins with the Spenceans, a British movement that was a logical continuation of Nonconformist concern for social justice and equality.

Jews as a segregated self-separating self-obsessed minority would never ever have produced such a thing as the Enlightenment, no matter how much they later contributed to it. One can of course find ‘Enlightened’ ideas within the traditional framework, mixed up with all of the peculiar old customs and relics of bronze-age superstitions. This was indeed also true for most of the world’s other religions- some schools of Islamic thought verged on Atheism, and forms of philosophical skepticism and atheism also flourished within the vast framework of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Indeed, it was only in the rival traditions of West European Latin Christianity and its Protestant offshoot that Enlightened ideas got squeezed out and had to start fighting on their own account.

Mediaeval Catholicism allowed a broad spectrum of thought. Many of the later mediaeval popes were not really Christian, tending to Deism or Scepticism or even Atheism. The Reformation tried to be and in many cases actually was a deeply conservative movement, a removal of the alien incursions of centuries. But when Catholicism finally accepted the need to ‘clean up its act’, it did so in a a way that made it almost impossible for moderate Protestants to be reconciled to it. The Council of Trent insisted that lunatic ideas like Transubstantiation, near-deification of the Virgin Mary and huge powers for the Vatican Hierarchy were made it certain that the differences within one single branch of the Christian faith could only be resolved by war.

If the Council of Trent had been able to reconcile moderate Protestant to a reformed and moderate Catholicism, there would probably have been no Enlightenment. Likewise if they had managed the military conquest of Protestant Europe, as very nearly happened several times. But by the 18th century there was stalemate, a peace that seemed to have very little to do with God. The Enlightenment grew among dissident Christians and ex-Christians, people who very reasonably appalled by what official religion had done.

If official religion was no longer seen as a source of either wisdom or virtue, then there was little reason to impose putative restrictions on those who had refused to conform to it. Christian Europe had in any case always had confused mixed feeling about its Jews, the people who were the heroes of its own Old Testament. Every other non-Christian minority was suppressed and wiped out, with a thoroughness and a ferocity that made people almost forget that Europe had ever been anything but Christian. Only the Jewish minority was allowed a marginal but definite existence. And with the Enlightenment, there was no longer any good reason to keep them marginal.

This contribution of 19th century Jews to the Enlightenment was also part of the assimilation of a previously impervious minority within European society. Conventional Christianity demanded the surrender of Jewish identity as the price for full membership of the society. The Enlightenment let everyone find their own level, and keep as much or as little of their separate identity as they saw fit.

The US wrote its constitution on the basis of the Enlightenment or Cosmopolitical world view, and with an intention of limiting the power of government. This led to a political system seriously out of tune with the actual beliefs of the vast majority of the population. Covert ways were found to exclude non-whites, Afro-Americans in particular, despite their theoretical legal equality. Inevitably, most of actual social practice was full of hypocrisy and self-righteous evasiveness. The letter of the law is in flat contradiction with the general assumption that the USA is a Christian country.

Most Jews in America have understood and supported the Cosmopolitical view, either from idealism or from a sensible recognition of their own long-term interest. Likewise in Europe, the creation of effective Cosmopolitical structures will benefit everyone, but should be of particularly strong interest to those who do not fit in definitely with any one nation. No one is currently expecting Sir James to say ‘ich bien ein Frankfurter’. The singular German, Jewish, French and English roots of the Goldschmidts of Frankfurt were not a problem in the relatively humane Europe that existed before the First World War . They are not currently a problem in a Europe where old antagonism are transformed into democratic Cosmopolitical politics. But Goldsmith himself is working busily to weaken that structure, with a blissful unawareness of the horrors that may be unleashed if it were ever to break down.

***

Goldsmith quite frequently shows an encyclopaedic ignorance. He can not be bothered to correct simple misunderstandings that a quick look in any decent encyclopaedia would correct. Nor does he seem to have anyone working for him who could do so. He blames the US intervention in Somalia for the collapse of Somali society, which had already occurred before they got there (p 53). He also attributes Free Trade to David Ricardo (p 15), whereas any decent reference work would have told him that Ricardo’s main work was an integrated theory of value, wages, profits and rents. Concerning Free Trade, Ricardo had little to add, apart from pioneering opposition to the Corn Laws. The man himself says that ‘the injurious effects of the mercantile system have been fully exposed by Dr. Smith. (On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter XXII.) Smith had actually just asserted this as a dogma set amidst a serious analysis of many other economic matters – but that’s a topic for another article.

The point to note is that Goldsmith will talk as if he knows it all, even when he is really quite ignorant. It is a quality that must have helped make him a grand business success – a brashly confident and aggressive person will end up either rich or bankrupt. Interesting enough, Goldsmith did go bankrupt once, quite early in his career. Eventually, to cheer himself up, he decided to go out to lunch:

“At a corner kiosk I bought the Paris-Presse, to see if my bankruptcy had made the newspapers,” he remembers. “But when I opened it the first thing I saw were big headlines saying ‘BANK STRIKE’. I couldn’t believe it.

“For the first time in twenty years the staff of every French bank had decided to go on strike. Not a single one had opened that morning, and – more important still – not a single bill had been presented for payment. Jimmy Goldsmith was not bankrupt; at least not for the moment.” (Tycoon: the life of James Goldsmith, by Geoffrey Wansell. Grafton Books 1987, p 16.)

This gave him time to put together a deal and save himself, so that he became a famous billionaire rather than a forgotten failure.

People like to think that there is some ‘X-plus’ factor that helps make the successful people successful. They are the ‘winners’, and always destined to win. The others are ‘losers’, whose failure is a quite deserved punishment for their own inadequacy. And since it is only possible to tell the ‘winners’ from the ‘losers’ by the fact that one sort win and the other sort lose, this view of the world is wonderfully immune from factual disproof.

Supposing that one were to persuade a large group of men to play ‘Russian roulette’ as many as six times each, each time using a fresh gun. All of them would have been foolish, but some of them would end up as survivors. Looking at it in individual terms, each man might count his survival as miraculous. But statistics predict that there would be survivors, a surprisingly large number of survivors, fully one third of the original group. If you find this number puzzling, remember that each round is likely to eliminate one-sixth of the survivors, and not one-sixth of the original number, as would happen if they all went on using the same guns. And you can also verify it by rolling a dice, counting one as death.

One could go further. Supposing one got a few thousand gamblers to agree to play Russian Roulette a full twenty-five times. Each would have a very low chance of individual survival – about one in a hundred, I think. But if a few thousand gamblers try it, then simple statistics would tell you that a few dozen would succeed. For each of them individually, it might seem miraculous. But for the group this is just what one would expect. If a large number of people take foolish chances, some of them are bound to get away with it. Their achievements will look rather special and miraculous only to those who forget about all of the corresponding failures.

Goldsmith’s career has included many errors, errors which finished off many similar men but which happened to rebound to his benefit. Surprisingly, it turns out that this scion of old well-connected German-Jewish banking circles had a completely false idea of what he was taking on in his battle with Private Eye:

“The magazine epitomised the worst features of English society, he believed, and he had the financial power to defeat it. What had begun as a battle to protect himself, and one of his solicitors, Eric Levine, from libel, had quickly escalated into a crusade, taking a great deal of his time and energy.’ It was also a crusade which he could not hope to win. ‘The magazine was a club of British journalists, and I did not realise the importance of what I was handling! I did not realise that Private Eye was part of the whole British press.’ It was a telling naivete.’ Ibid, p 235) However ”’The case against the Eye made me richer than I ever dreamed of’, he explains now, ‘because by going private at the bottom of the market, and buying my shares when they were cheap, meant that instead of having a huge empire, in which I had only a percentage, I ended up owning the whole thing.

”By forcing Jimmy Goldsmith so mercilessly into the public eye, the magazine had also contrived to make sure that instead of simply being a financier who had built an empire but ended up owning only a tiny portion of it himself, he had become its principal owner. ‘If the case hadn’t happened I’d have built a huge empire, been a notable, but I wouldn’t have been a capitalist. I was forced to be a capitalist. The decision to go into Slater Walker, which led to the Eye, turned me from being the head of a company into being rich. It’s odd.'” (Ibid, p 257).

Viewing matters in this light, I see no reason to be overawed by the success of Jimmy Goldsmith. He’s not all that different from the people who become multi-millionaires through the football pools or National Lottery. In a growing and speculative economy, a few of the ambitious and risk-taking young men are bound to end up fabulously wealthy. Though some of the ‘losers’ will be incompetents who were never likely to get anywhere, most success or failure rests on sheer luck.

***

Goldsmith shows an astonishing ignorance and prejudice on the complex matter of Eastern Europe’s numerous overlapping and variously entangled nationalities. Thus:

“The Czechs and the Slovaks are two nations which in 1918 were forced into a single state, Czechoslovakia. As soon as they became free after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they discarded their artificial union and peacefully divorced.” (The Trap, p 50).

The real history is that these two very similar people chose to live in a single state as soon as they were free from German and Hungarian domination. There were always tensions and rivalries, as there are between English and Scotch. But the similarities were usually more important. Hitler separated them, incorporating the Czech part into Germany, but they got back together again after his downfall. During the whole long period of Soviet domination they worked together – Alexander Dubchek was a Slovak, after all, and his autobiography Hope Dies Last gives an excellent guide to the complexities. After 1989, there was still little desire for separation. But then the Slovaks followed the trend in the rest of Eastern Europe in electing reformed Communists after they had seen the Thatcher-worshipping free-marketeers in action. The Czechs took a different line. Incompatible politics and economics broke up a union that both sides would have preferred to keep.

Despite being a man of Anglo-French background and German-Jewish origins, Goldsmith has a dogmatically simple approach to nations. It is as if he saw each nation as having been created by God, complete with is own garden walls. The unpleasant and potentially explosive problem of overlapping nationalities is just ignored. Most people understand that Nelson Mandela is performing a delicate balancing-act between a great diversity of factional and intermixed racial and tribal groups. But for Goldsmith, “they back the Xhosa nation to dominate all others. We are witnessing an attempt to form another Yugoslavia.” (Ibid, p 52.)

Was Yugoslavia such a bad thing? Given the intermixing and overlap of the Southern Slavs, the choice was Yugoslavia or ‘ethnic cleansing’. In the post-1989 euphoria, Western Europe blundered and backed the dismemberment of a state that had more or less kept the peace. And it was all done messily. The rights of Muslim Albanians within Serbia have simply been ignored. The rights of majority-Serb populations in the various other administrative units of former Yugoslavia were neither definitely affirmed nor definitely rejected. A Bosnian Muslim factional leadership with no real understanding of politics was allowed to set itself up as a sovereign government with theoretically unlimited rights over Bosnian Serbs, who had been the majority before the World War Two massacres when Muslims and Croats were Nazi auxiliaries. The matter is now being settled by war rather than law, with the USA currently ready to give the Bosnian Serbs a large chunk of what they originally took up arms for.

In South Africa, if Mandela can not hold things together, I doubt if anyone else can. And I doubt if any other simple or stable pattern could be found. For Southern Africa does not consist of distinct nations with clear and accepted national territories. The various peoples overlap and are intermingled; sovereign nations could only be established by massive ‘ethnic cleansing’. And it is uncertain if Zulus could even co-exist with their fellow-Zulus, outside of the larger framework of a multi-ethnic state. The mighty Shaka was murdered by his relatives, after all.

In Western Europe, Britishness and Irishness are still at odds in Ulster. The French and Germans formed the European Community, because the likely alternative was yet another war over an ambiguous border that had been moving back and forth ever since the days of Charlemagne. To the East, Germany could make an exhalant claim to chunks of what is now Poland. Poland has its own claims on its smaller neighbours further east. Hungary is concerned about local majorities of ethnic Hungarians in territories that have been part of Hungary within living memory.

Goldsmith understands none of this. He complains that “The European Unions was built in secret” (p 64), by which he means that some power has passed from the Council of Ministers to the Commission. But how else could Europe work? In the Council of Ministers, each individual fights for the particular interests of their own nation. In the European Union, Commissioners appointed by the various governments try to find a common European interest in one particular area of responsibility.

The Trap contrasts ministers, “elected national heads of state or their representatives”, with the “technocrats of the Commission”. Now I have no great personal regard for Commissioners like Leon Britten or Neil Kinnock. But the former was a senior minister at a time when the Tories had substantial popular support. The latter only just missed becoming British Prime Minister, and would certainly have won if people had had an inkling of how Major would really turn out. Even Delors, arch-Eurocrat, would have had a sporting chance of becoming the popularly-elected President of France had he chosen to risk it.

“As for the European Parliament, it is a pseudo-democratic institution. It is totally dominated by two major parties, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, both of which share with the European Commission the vision of supranational, centralized European state dominating a homogenised union. Its only real function is to provide cover for the Commission.” (p 73).

Goldsmith seems of have picked up some Trotskyite jargon form somewhere. I’ve no idea how, but lapsed Trotskyists can end up almost anywhere. ‘Pseudo-democratic’ is Trot-speak for any expression of popular will that is contrary to their own hopes and expectations.

Socialists and Christian Democrats do between them represent a large majority of the population of Europe, a population that knows very well that the drift is towards union. Anti-Europe parties exist and have so far been rejected by the majority. Even in Britain, a clear chance to pull out via a referendum was quite decisively rejected.

The German Christian Democrats are a long way from being my favourite people. But it is they who have repeatedly crushed and disrupt German neo-Fascist parties, limiting such people to the status of an obnoxious fringe.

In Italy, the fall of the worst and most sleazy branch of Christian Democracy initially let in something quite a bit worse, a coalition of bigots, tricksters and Fascists. Under the slogan of ending corruption, the Italians got a government that reestablished friendly relations with the Mafia. The old corrupt crown have been replaced by a new corrupt crowd, a crowd that shows a strong hostility to all that was wise and positive in the ‘Italian Economic Miracle’. This may be containable – the original Italian Fascists were less obnoxious than their counterparts in other nations. But many factors in the present situation reminds one of the 1920s and 1930s.

The new factor that gives hope for avoiding the disasters on 1926-1944 is the presence of a truly effective supranational body in the European Union. It would have to be broken up before any really heavy nationalism or fascism could get going. Yet this is just what Goldsmith is after.

Goldsmith, of course, has his own vision of Europe, superior to the actually existing reality. Just as the Far Left in the 1970s had their own superior vision, that led them to disrupt the real if limited gains that were then possible. Apart from us in the Bevin Society, the entire left called for ‘all or nothing’. And ended up with nothing.

Some of what Goldsmith says about Far Eastern competition makes sense. But then, a lot of people have said something of the sort. The gradual equalisation of Europe and East Asia is no bad thing in itself. Handled well, it could be a great blessing for everyone. Handled badly it could also be a great curse, of course, even a ‘trap’. But all of this is well known. Free market dogmatists want to break down all barriers, which would lead to a massive drop in living standard for European and North American workers, followed probably by some massive right-wing counter-reaction. For this reason it is all being done slowly and carefully, with some regard for the perils and destructiveness of free trade. Arguably, nothing like enough care is being shown, but the problems are at least understood. And as the richer parts of East Asia overtake the poorer parts of Western Europe, the potential for harm becomes gradually less.

Goldsmith’s distinctiveness comes in wanted to cut out Far Eastern competition at the same time as impoverishing ordinary working people in Western Europe. He says “the universal welfare state cannot be sustained. Its economic costs and its social consequences are unbearable” (p 87). That is to say, the methods that led to an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity since World War Two must be thrown out and replaced with bad old measures that have always previously led to misery, starvation and warfare.

“For decades we have defined our system without any thought as to why the need for welfare develops or how we should provide support without destroying the moral fibre of those who receive it and without destabilising society as a whole” (p 99).

This ‘loss of moral fibre’ is not spelt out very specifically. Presumably it does not include living in adulterous relationships, nor keeping two separate families, since that is how Goldsmith himself lives. In point of fact, he says nothing very specific about what’s good or bad in modern social trends. He never defines just what it is that other people have failed to define properly. He’s as much of a muddlehead as his old enemies in Private Eye, who talk like old-fashioned moralists while including all sorts of modern permissiveness in their small adds. (Back in the sixties, I seem to remember that Private Eye was full of things that just did not appear in magazines that ordinary people would encounter or would want to be seen reading.)

Goldsmith calls for a return to some supposed ‘good old days’. One need only look at Engels’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 to discover how the much purer capitalism and minimal welfare of 19th century Britain produced a vastly more drastic break-down of family life. Measures like abolishing child labour and providing more education reversed this trend for a time. So too did the influence of the rest of society on a working class that gained some rights through trade unionism. For a time, one had the strong familiar family patterns of the ‘respectable’ working class. But then you had 1920s American innovations like divorce and the break-up of the extended family – disturbances of a genuinely old tradition, changes in life’s fundamentals whose impact was very accurately foreseen by the reactionaries of that era.

Everyone nowadays pretends that divorce and nuclear families are part of the traditional natural Christian order of things. This is much less rational than what the real traditionalists were saying a couple of generations back. The final breakdown of conventional morality that occurred in the 1960s was a public recognition of conventional Christianity’s loss of credibility among the mass of the population. The Enlightenment and civilised paganism had finally spread right through the society.

Strictly speaking, family life in British society has already collapsed. The self-regulating kin groups have almost all gone. All that remain are personal and sexual bonds, ‘nuclear families’ that are neither traditional nor very stable. People stay in pair-bonded relationships for as long as it suits them – for their whole lives, in many cases. But the balance between freedoms and obligations has changed. Obligations are for other people: In one’s own case it is always the freedom to live one’s own life that is paramount.

Since this arrangement is not obviously worse than the actual practice of the world which proceeded it, no reversion to older forms looks likely. I myself am sure that we gained far more than we lost. But society can not work effectively until we drop the pretence and start imposing only those limitations that we ourselves would be willing to accept.

Conventional families were the product of peasant agriculture. They have always withered under the pressures of both commerce and urban life. The family without a little family-worked patch of land or secure family-run small business turns out to be a very unnatural and unstable thing. It persists mostly out of habit and out of regard for customs from earlier times. And what Goldsmith says on family life is incoherent, the reflex protest of a discontented right-winger, a man who has no intention of curbing any of his own pleasures.

***

On business matters, Goldsmith very much follows the Anglo-American line that profits must override all other considerations. The minor detail that the more protected and more socially concerned management in Germany, Japan and the rest of East Asia have comfortably outperformed ‘proper’ capitalism does not enter his mental universe. Not unless it is this that makes him dread their influence. Certainly, he is a prime example of the right-wing business nihilism that broke up much that once seemed solid and reliable.

“Just as he had condemned the suffocation of England and the bureaucracy of France in the past, now he was attacking the stuffy “corporatism” of the United States. That was the new windmill he chose to tilt at on the road to Wall Street.

“‘Although corporations belong to their shareholders,’ he wrote not long afterwards in the Wall Street Journal, ‘corporate managements sometimes believe that the business that employs them has become an institution and that they are the trustees of that institution. Some believe that they have developed some sort of proprietorial rights. Shareholders then become no more than an inconvenience.’ That was not Jimmy Goldsmith’s view, particularly if and when he intended to become one of an American corporation’s major shareholders. He had every intention of making himself extremely inconvenient to any corporate management that failed to take him seriously when he launched a takeover bid. ‘The principal difference between a friendly merger and a hostile takeover is that management agrees to a merger. A hostile takeover is carried out without their approval. A hostile takeover is only hostile to established management’…

“In the America of the mid-1980s, with the mania for massive takeover takeovers running at the highest level for almost two decades, Jimmy Goldsmith suddenly found himself perfectly placed to do what he had always done best- topple the established order.

“America seemed to prize a piratical predatory individualist stalking established companies. Even the New York Times had concluded its March 1985 editorial by arguing that “Corporate raiders don”t perform their useful function altruistically. But their self-interest usually leads to a collective good.” He had been preparing himself for precisely this opportunity all his life. “In a free economy the inefficient are eliminated and the efficient – as long as they remain so – grow for the benefit of all,” he wrote in The Financier magazine. There were no rules that Jimmy Goldsmith liked better than the rules of the jungle and the free market” (Tycoon, p 314 – 315.)He can take this view while being well aware of the basically irrational nature of market movements. “‘I don’t often invest in the market,’ Jimmy Goldsmith explains, ‘but I sometimes do, and when I do I will never invest if I don’t first telephone half a dozen supposed experts and find them unanimous. Because when 90 per cent of people are thinking the same thing, you can be certain that if you do exactly the opposite you’ll make a fortune; and there’s a very good structural reason for that.

“‘If everybody thinks that the market is going up then one thing is certain – they’ve already invested all their funds because they think they’re going to increase them. So there’s no more money left to go into the market. Therefore the market can only go down. If everybody thinks that the market is going to go down then they will have already sold, so they’re full of cash, and at the slightest turn they’re going to plunge in again and buy. The market can only go up. Structurally if you can find unanimity and do the opposite you can be certain to be successful”. (Ibid, p 303).

Sir James Goldsmith has a wonderfully good understanding of how to increase his own wealth by methods that are entirely legal, even if many people find them objectionable. He plays the existing system, and plays it in a rather more ruthless fashion than people were used to. He has been clever, and also quite lucky, surviving at least one disaster that should have finished him off. Just as similar setbacks must have finished off many other clever ambitious but only averagely lucky ‘entrepreneurs’. Goldsmith’s success as a stocks-and-shares gambler does not make him remotely competent to pass judgment on wider matters.

Business is a peculiar game, much stranger and more complex than chess or poker or any of the other intellectual oddities that humanity has invented over the centuries. But the exact relationship between business strategies and the growth of human prosperity is a complex one. Classical capitalism in 19th century Britain and the USA amazed the world, but only because there was no serious competition. Neither of them ever managed as much as 2% annual growth over any long period. They looked impressive only in a world that expected one century to be much like the last: they were decidedly sluggish by modern standards.

The British economy has shown a remarkable consistency since the 18th century. Its initial dramatic success came from being the only society that played the capitalist and industrial game. When other nations had to think it all out from scratch, they came up with superior variants on the original. Each wave has improved over the last – America better than Britain, Western Europe better than America, East Asia currently the best of all. All going for more state control, better treatment for labour and active partnership between the state and private enterprise.

Tory ‘reforms’ in the 1980s were a social abomination. They boosted the rich and created a huge mass of displaced unwanted poor. The justification for this was that it would be good for the economy, and therefore good for everyone in the long run. But at the end of the day, the Tory record for economic growth is the worst for any post-war government. Meanwhile our more socially concerned European neighbours continue to outperform us. France did this in the 1950s, using exactly the dirigiste methods that are anathema both to Thatcher and to Goldsmith. A man would not be considered to be wise on general social matters if he were a very fine chess-player or an outstanding concert pianist or a mathematical genius. Unlike any of these, businessmen like Goldsmith – and also some of the rising strata of business women – consider that what they have learned in their peculiar, stressful and artificial world of competitive capitalism is suitable for universal application. It ain’t necessarily so. Eliminating business-people entirely seems to be bad in the long run, as the USSR found. But it is also a good idea to keep them in proper bounds and not allowing them to rampage all over the society. Not only is the unrestrained spread of business values a social disaster, it is also likely to be bad economically.

Business in a society probably plays the same role as oil in an old-fashioned clockwork watch. Some oil is necessary for the mechanism to run at all. Extra oil may improve it. But oil alone will never tell the time.

Goldsmith, Ricardo, Adam Smith etc. rely on a simple identification of extra revenues gained by a successful capitalist with extra wealth gained by the whole society. Now why should this be so? Europe was ready for some sort of economic take-off in the 18th century. Governments had done all that they could to promote it; the ruling class actively desired it. There had been a steady expansion of commerce in Europe from the 11th century onwards, boosted by the state-led opening up of the Americas from the 15th century onwards. There was in England the state sponsorship of science through the Royal Society, and the use of Patents to encourage openness about new inventions. There was an active well-educated and anti-traditional stratum of Nonconformists, ‘strangers in their own land’, ready and eager to revolutionise the world. Full-blown capitalism – the world view that sees life as a burden on money – only developed later.

18th century Britain was highly commercial, in the sense that money had invaded many spheres of life. But almost everyone saw money as a means to an end – that end usually being a life as a member of the aristocracy. Strict capitalism – the notion of money as an end in itself – spread and flourished only after industry had got started. One might just as reasonably see modern capitalism as a result of industrialism, a system of grand gambling that only a rich strong society can get away with.

The British ruling class in the early 19th century gradually came to accept Adam Smith’s dogmatic notion that success had been achieved only through the profit motive. It was taken as an undeniable fact that industrialisation had happened despite the various government attempts to boost prosperity. Such ‘wasteful’ activities were therefore discouraged, or at best left unchanged. Conceited Victorians were sure that it was God and Free Trade that had made Britain mighty. They sat back confidently for God and Free Trade to make them mightier yet.

It was the beginning of the end. Britain was overtaken by rival nations like Germany, where the state played a large role. In the rest of Europe, business always accepted wider social responsibilities. And both law and custom prevented the sort of predatory take-over and restructuring that has been the basis of Goldsmith’s success.

Victorian Britain was sure that it had God on its side. God perhaps took a different view of the matter.

Even though Goldsmith’s opposition to GATT and unrestricted free trade make might make him seem a bit leftist, it is an irrational opinion held by a right-wing bigot. An enthusiast for allowing the rich within Europe to grab to grab the public wealth and ignore customary social obligations. From any sort of serious left-wing viewpoint, the man is far more of an enemy than any Liberal or Christian Democrat. He should be treated as such.

[admin]

Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy? The notorious financier pedophile told exaggerated stories of his time in intelligence circles — but some of those stories may have been, at least partially, true
by Vicky Ward
Rolling Stone
July 15, 2021
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/cu ... y-1197708/

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NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 13: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend Batman Forever/R. McDonald Event on June 13, 1995 in New York City. (Photo by Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

Back in 2002, when I was reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s finances for Vanity Fair magazine, he was not a household name. During that time, I paid a visit to the Federal Medical Center, Devens in Devens, Massachusetts, to meet with an inmate, one Steven Hoffenberg.

We sat in a little room near a recreation area, Hoffenberg dressed in the requisite orange jumpsuit, while I, several months pregnant with twins, was dressed per prison requirements: as shapelessly as possible.

It was an absolutely intriguing meeting.

Hoffenberg was serving 18 years in prison for committing a $450 million Ponzi scheme. In the 1980s, he’d been running Towers Financial, a debt collection and reinsurance business, and had worked alongside Epstein, who was a paid consultant. Hoffenberg told me that Epstein had plans to turn Towers into a global colossus — through illegal means.

But Hoffenberg was so transfixed by Epstein and his ideas that he had even paid the rent for Epstein’s office space. (Now, he says, he was “stupid” and greedy for doing so.)

Hoffenberg told me with a sad grin that he represented a problem for Epstein because while they were working together, Epstein had confided in him as to how, exactly, he made a career out of conning people and institutions — not least because the idea was that they’d do it together.

Hoffenberg said that Epstein had a term for the perfect execution of the grift. He called it “playing the box,” which meant that he ensured that even if his crime was uncovered, the victim would be unable to do anything about it, either because of social embarrassment or because the money was tucked away in a place where they couldn’t either find it or get it.

(What Hoffenberg had failed to realize, he told me, is that Epstein would con him. Epstein would take $100 million of Towers money, move it offshore, and meanwhile cooperate with U.S. prosecutors against Hoffenberg, who was unable to do anything about this because he’d pleaded guilty, which meant there was no trial — and therefore no discovery.)

I can’t prove all of Hoffenberg’s claims — but some of them are accurate.

I have discovered, for example, that Epstein certainly did secretly cooperate against Hoffenberg and gave at least three interviews to prosecutors, and that had the case gone to trial, a source with knowledge says it would have likely turned out far worse for Epstein than for Hoffenberg.

Hoffenberg also knew something else Epstein wanted hidden, according to Hoffenberg: He claimed that Epstein moved in intelligence circles.

The Hoffenberg-Epstein relationship was not something Epstein, then pitching himself to Vanity Fair as a money-manager extraordinaire for billionaires only, had volunteered to me.

So when I gingerly raised Hoffenberg to Epstein, and mentioned I had documentation showing that the two were linked, the financier turned really nasty.

He maintained he hardly knew Hoffenberg, he’d just consulted briefly on a couple of deals, that he’d not been involved in any prosecution of Hoffenberg and that if I wrote any different, things would turn out badly for me. Here is exactly what he said:

“If there’s any implication of wrong doing, I will take legal action against you personally. I’m telling you so you understand. I will be as harsh as I possibly can personally … not for the magazine, but you, because I had this discussion with you. This relationship is with you.… You shouldn’t risk your future for a job.”

Now, Epstein’s “sensitivity” regarding Hoffenberg was equal to his sensitivity on what he called “the girls.”

He went berserk if you mentioned either subject.

In hindsight, one has to wonder if Hoffenberg presented an equally big problem as “the girls” would. Hoffenberg told me that in the 1980s, after Epstein left Bear Sterns in ignominious circumstances, Epstein was trained in moving money off-shore and that a mentor of Epstein’s was someone Hoffenberg knew: a British defense contractor, who died in 2011, named Douglas Leese.

Hoffenberg claimed that Leese was an arms dealer. (Leese’s son Julian says that is not true.) But the U.K. parliamentary record does mention Leese in reference to the El Yammamah arms deal of the early 1980s.

I remember distinctly that in our first meeting Hoffenberg told me that Leese was pivotal in understanding Jeffrey’s MO, because Leese had introduced him not only to aristocratic Europeans (who Epstein subsequently fleeced) but to all sorts of people in the arms business — including the late Turkish-born businessman Adnan Kashoggi — and, allegedly, the late media mogul Robert Maxwell.

Back in 2002 I didn’t pay much attention to this.

This was because Epstein breezily threw me off.

First, Epstein told me he’d never met Maxwell. And I asked him twice if he knew Leese, whom I had never heard of, and Epstein said no. The second time, he elaborated:

“Douglas Leese … I think he was the father of somebody I knew … I think his son was friendly with Ferranti, that’s where that whole crowd comes in that you asked me about a long time ago. I think his name was Nicholas … it was sort of that 66th Street building, I think they might have all lived there.”

So, I forgot about Leese. And I didn’t bother to pursue the notion that Epstein had known Maxwell.

But all these years later, Leese’s name popped up again in my new reporting for a podcast and a documentary series about Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of helping Epstein in his alleged sex-trafficking operations of minors. (She has denied all charges.)

First, I found a lawsuit filed by Leese in Florida, in which he asserted that he “was involved with various highly confidential business enterprises including business in the United States, some of which involved governmentally- involved or other highly confidential business projects.”

Second, a source who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed told me that Epstein had invited the source to join him and Leese on a private-jet trip to the Pentagon in 1981.

Even Leese’s son Julian told me that his father was a mentor of sorts to Epstein in the 1980s and was totally shocked that Epstein would have pretended not to know him.

So why Epstein’s silence on Leese?

And was his denial about knowing Robert Maxwell equally meaningless?

What about the spy stuff?

Hoffenberg told me that Epstein had said he’d worked on several projects with Robert Maxwell, including solving Maxwell’s “debt” issues. (Maxwell died in 1991, under vey strange circumstances, apparently having fallen off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, in the middle of the night and it was discovered in the aftermath that he’d stolen 100s of millions of dollars from the pensions of his employees.)

Epstein had also told Hoffenberg that via Maxwell and Leese he was involved in something that Hoffenberg described as “national security issues,” which he says involved “blackmail, influence trading, trading information at a level that is very serious and dangerous.”

So here’s where it gets tricky.

Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s had led him to work for multiple governments, including the Israelis.

Some of these sources are more reliable than others. But the gist of the claims that you will be able to hear, and ultimately watch in a three-hour documentary series, is that Maxwell, who was himself a conduit between the Israelis and other governments during his life time, introduced Epstein to Israeli leaders, who then allegedly used Epstein as the equivalent of an old-fashioned Russian “sleeper,” someone who could be useful in an “influence campaign.”

The sources, who range from former arms dealers to former spies — and also Hoffenberg — suggest that Epstein, who lacked any sort of moral compass, decided to go one step further and compromise influential people by recording them doing things they wouldn’t want made public.

All of this is completely unprovable. And people close to Robert Maxwell say it sounds ridiculous.

But here’s what’s odd.

First, Epstein did visit Israel in 2008, with a view to moving there permanently and avoid his jail time in 2009 for the state charges he was convicted of. On his return, he told Russian model Kira Diktyar that he’d changed his mind and decided to face the music. (He didn’t mention he’d avoided a far more serious federal investigation, thanks to a cushy non-prosecution agreement.)

And once he got out of jail, in the last 10 years of his life, Epstein bragged to various people, including journalists, that he was advising a whole assortment of foreign leaders who included Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Zayed, Mohammed Bin Salman, various African dictators, Israel, the British — and, of course, the Americans.

He also told several of the same people that he was making a fortune out of arms, drugs, and diamonds.

He told one person, journalist Edward J. Epstein, that he knew the owner of the deep-water port of Djibouti on the horn of Africa, a smuggler’s paradise, so well that he was basically in charge of it.

Now, according to my sources in the intelligence world, this is hyperbole — but also not completely ridiculous. His name was mentioned as a middleman in both Africa and the Middle East. He was known in the intelligence world as a “hyper-fixer,” somebody who can go between different cultures and networks.

Usually these people are very silent about what they do.

And yet Epstein was not silent. He had a photo of the Saudi crown prince, MBS on the wall, and photos of Bill Gates and all the VIPS who flocked to his salons.

It’s not wholly surprising therefore that the same sources who say they know he was some sort of intelligence asset say that he became a liability — which is why, possibly, he lost any “protection” and was arrested.

A handful of people I interviewed, including former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, maintain that this is exactly what happened to Robert Maxwell, which is why, they say, Maxwell was killed. His financial problems were about to make him vulnerable. (His death was officially said to be because of a heart attack.)

Who knows what to make of all this?

But, when I think back to 2002, when I first met Steve Hoffenberg, I do remember asking him why he thought that Epstein, normally reclusive, had raised his head above the parapet and attracted media attention by flying Bill Clinton to Africa.

Hoffenberg had smiled.

“He can’t help himself. He broke his own rule,” Hoffenberg said. “He always said he knew the only way he could get away with everything he did was to stay under the radar, but now he’s gone and blown it.”

Vicky Ward is the host of the Audible Original podcast “Chasing Ghislaine,”.

[admin]

The Scandal Unveiled
by Eustace Mullins

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The Wall Street Journal has led the expose of the current financial scandals which have supposedly rocked Wall Street. They have given us endless details about Dennis Levine and Ivan Boesky; they have even been forced to mention the name of Drexel Burnham Lambert, investment bankers extraordinary. What they have not done is to tell the American public just what is going on -- who is doing what to whom. You will read here for the first time the names of the major players, names which the Wall Street Journal dares not mention. The first name is Rothschild. Not once has the Wall Street Journal, during its current "expose", dared to mention the vital information that Drexel Burnham Lambert (pronounced Lambeer), is the New York branch of Banque Bruxelles Lambert, of Brussels, Belgium or that the enormously wealthy and powerful Lamberts are the Belgian branch of the Rothschild family. Baron Lambert is regularly listed as an attendee at Bilderberger meetings. The Wall Street Journal would have you believe that a greedy young stockbroker, Dennis Levine, a minor figure at Drexel Burnham Lambert, cut himself in on some upcoming deals at his firm and stashed $12 million in an offshore bank; that he was contacted by one Ivan Boesky, an "arbitrator" (read "rag and bone man" see The World Order by Eustace Mullins for further information), who offered Levine a contract whereby Boesky would pay Levine 5% of profits which Boesky made from stock trades involving inside information provided him by Levine. Said contract, of course was illegal; not only that, but it was a "breach of ethics", only the top officials of these firms being allowed to profit from such information. It was not for the clerks.

Let me tell you what was really going on. While Boesky and Levine were engaged in their penny ante operations, a gigantic financial plot, one might well say swindle, was being conducted to gain control of the major corporations for alien interests. The plot, quite simply, was to "buy" out or leverage these corporations by a consortium of international financiers who had unlimited capital at their command. The beauty of the plan was that, despite their unlimited capital, the conspirators would not put up any capital. Instead, they would create a new type of financial instrument, called a "junk bond", to pay for their seizure of these American corporations. The financial writers of the U.S. routinely refer to Drexel Burnham Lambert as the "creators of the junk bond". This is nonsense. The plan originated in Brussels, Belgium, at the offices of Banque Bruxelles Lambert. It is no accident that Brussels is the headquarters of NATO, which actually rules Europe in the name of the World Order, or that the head of NATO is Lord Carrington, a Rothschild relative, and partner of Henry Kissinger in the notorious international operation known as "Kiss Ass", an irreverent Wall Street title for the firm of Kissinger Associates, wheelers and dealers for the World Order. Nor is it an accident that in the current White House crisis, as Reagan stands convicted in the eyes of the world as an international conspirator caught with his hands in the till with his Israeli co-conspirators, who had to be hastily summoned to "take over" the situation? None other than Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, a partner in Kissinger Associates! Scowcroft is also a trustee of the Rand Corp., Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, and the US Air Force University; Lord Carrington has very close ties with the British royal Family, and is a director of continued on page Rio Tinto, one of the three firms on which the Rothschild fortune is based.

Brussels is also the location of the World Computer Centre, set up by Bank Rothschild to maintain computer records on every inhabitant of the world, who will thus be ruled from "World Headquarters". To understand this power, we must go back two hundred years in history. While the American colonists were fighting to win their independence, the British Crown cast about for some top combat troops who could put down the "rebels". The King was offered some seasoned troops, Hessians, by a minor German potentate, the Elector of Hesse. When the Elector received payment for his mercenaries, he entrusted the proceeds to a financial adviser, one Mayer Amschel Bauer of Frankfurt, Germany, later known as Rothschild. Rothschild invested the funds very profitably; the Elector suddenly died, and a new dynasty was born. With their newfound wealth, the Rothschilds developed a new technique, not merely for controlling one nation, but for controlling all nations simultaneously. The technique was simple. They would create a bogeyman, an evil militarist intent on conquering the entire world; the altruistic Rothschilds would finance "allies" to oppose and crush the evil fanatic. The first "monster" created by the new dynasty of international financiers was Napoleon. He was allowed to march across Europe, winning victory after victory against straw man opponents (the "fight game" has been manipulated by the Jacobs family in the U.S. for decades using the same technique). When the "dictator" had been built up to world class status, a phalanx of nations was financed and armed by the Rothschilds to rise up against him. Napoleon, who had been led to believe he had no serious opposition, was stunned to find at Waterloo that he had been betrayed by his own generals. In 1914, the Kaiser was the "monster" before whom civilization quailed; again benefactors were found to oppose him, the Morgans and Kuhn, Leob Co., acting as lieutenants for the Rothschilds, armed the "Allies" against the German militarists who tossed babies on their bayonets. In 1939, another "monster", Adolf Hitler, financed by the Bank of England, again menaced civilization. Once again, the only victor was the Rothschild family.

The Rothschild technique was a simple one; after setting up a central bank, the Rothschilds controlled a nation by controlling the issuance of money and credit. They then embarked on a ruinous program of armaments, financed by progressively higher and higher taxation, which reduced the citizens to the status of serfs. The munitions program, of course, was absolutely necessary because there would always be a "Rothschild- created monster" on the horizon. After defeating Napoleon, the Rothschilds brought the victorious allies together at the Rothschild headquarters, Vienna, for the Congress of Vienna in 1515. What has this to do with our current scandal ? Be patient. The mastermind of the present Drexel Burnham Lambert operation is a former partner of Banque Rothschild, Sir James Goldsmith. He is married to his third wife, the daughter of the Marquis of Londenderry, Viscount Castlereagh. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the negotiations were dominated by her ancestor, Viscount Castlereagh, the famed foreign minister of England. Castlereagh apparently did not understand at the time that his negotiations were designed to create a new ruler in Europe, the Rothschild family. Castlereagh was minister plenipotentiary of the victors at Waterloo, the British Crown. With him was his half-brother and heir, Lord Charles Stewart, British Ambassador to Vienna. At the Treaty of Paris, Castlereagh achieved his principal objective in France, to solidify the control of the Bourbons. Sir James Goldsmith's second wife had been Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, niece of the Comte de Paris, present head of the Bourbon family and pretender to the throne of France.

Viscount Castlereagh owed his spectacular rise to the fact that he was the godson of his uncle, Lord Camden (Charles Pratt), who served as attorney general of England and president of the Privy Council. Lord Camden frequently lent money to the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and became the power behind the Pitt ministry. The Pratt family has also been prominent behind the scenes in the United States. Pratt was John D. Rockefeller's partner in Standard Oil, and gave his New York mansion as the present headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations. His descendant, George Pratt Schultz, is now Secretary of State.

In 1822, Viscount Castlereagh realized how he had handed Europe over to the Rothschilds as a result of his actions at the Congress of Vienna. He became extremely depressed, realizing it was too late to rectify his acts. He had an audience with George IV, saying to him, "Sire, it is necessary to say good-bye to Europe." He then went to his home and committed suicide, cutting his carotid artery with a small penknife. There has been considerable speculation about his sudden depression and suicide, notably in "the Strange Death of Castlereagh" by H. Montgomery Hyde, a well-known British historian. Hyde suggests he may have been depressed by a false accusation of an act of homosexuality, or that he may have been given a drug which produced extreme depression.

Because Castlereagh delivered Europe into the hands of the Rothschilds through his diplomacy, Henry Kissinger openly modelled his own diplomatic career after Castlereagh (excepting, of course, the suicide). He reveals this resolve in his book, "A World Restored", Grusset & Dunlap 1964, which he dedicated to McGeorge Bundy of the Ford Foundation. Kissinger's goal, which he followed as Secretary of State, was to perpetuate the Rothschild world hegemony enthroned at the Congress of Vienna, which had been described by von Gentz, secretary to Prince von Metternich, as follows: "The real purpose of the Congress was to divide among the conquerors the spoils taken from the vanquished." From the Congress of Vienna came the phrases "Austrian School of Politics", and the "Austrian School of Economics" presently epitomized by Milton Friedman, in which Rothschild financial schemes are used to carry out Rothschild political goals.

Sir James Goldsmith's grandfather was financial adviser to Bismarck during the rise of the German Empire. Goldsmith first married Isabel Patino, heiress to the tin fortune of the Patino family, which had also been backed by the Rothschilds. Isabel Patino died mysteriously; Goldsmith then married the niece of the Bourbon heir, and third, the descendant of Viscount Castlereagh. Goldsmith is now bidding for Channel 5, the French TV station; he owns L'Express, the biggest news-weekly in France; Lire, a major book periodical, and La Cite de France, the largest French book publisher. He also owns a weekly newspaper in Belgium. TheWall Street Journal reported that Goldsmith made $93 million profit in a recent $600 million takeover attempt at Goodyear.

The Wall Street Journal noted that Goldsmith was a major partner of Boesky in his operations, having invested $3 million of Drexel Burnham Lambert funds in the Boesky deal. Boesky's other major partners were Milton and Joseph Dresner, $10 million; Marty Peretz, publisher of the fanatically pro-Israeli publication, the New Republic, $1 million; and Lewis Lehrman, famed "conservative" backer of Ronald Reagan, the Lehrman Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, $1 million.

Boesky was characterized in the Washington Post of Nov. 21, 1986 as follows: "Boesky is known for his passion for the State of Israel and Jewish causes." He was appointed to the notorious Holocaust Commission by President Reagan, for whom he had been active as a fund-raiser. These connections stood him in good stead when Sorkin of the Securities Exchange Commission announced a supposedly heavily punitive assessment against Boesky, an unprecedented $100 million, of which $50 million was a fine and $50 million for "restitution" to investors. This seemed a drastic penalty, but the Wall Street Journal promptly pointed out that $25 million of this fine will be allowed as a tax deduction for Boesky. The SEC also outraged Wall Street investors by allowing Boesky to unload $440 million worth of stocks before announcing their punitive action against him. These stocks, principally holdings of Time, CSX and Goodyear which Boesky had been buying for future takeover action, immediately dropped 15% in value, which meant that Boesky picked up about $70 million in profits by unloading them, while other Wall Street investors lost heavily. Merrill Lynch alone lost $40 million because of Boesky's stock dumping. At the same time, Morgan Stanley's real estate division is selling Boesky's Beverly Hills Hotel (Boesky married the daughter of Ben Silberstein, who owned this hotel) for $140 million, of which Boesky will receive half, or $70 million. The SEC also is continuing to allow Boesky to trade stocks until April, 1988, which caused further anger among investors who have been damaged by his manipulations. Boesky also was rumored to have made video tapes of some of his associates while discussing these manipulations, but later stories said he had only made audio tapes of their dealings with him. A source commented to the Wall Street Journal, Nov. 21, 1986, "First he sold his friends to the government, then he sold his stocks to his friends." The American public is not likely to be informed that Boesky's profits, large though they may seem, are minuscule compared to the profits made in these takeovers by the major players, Sir James Goldsmith, and his partners, the Rothschilds. Our "investigative reporters" are not allowed to go beyond the straw men, nor have they ever heard of the Congress of Vienna, where these formulae were developed. The American people are misled into concerns about tax reform, while their manipulators prepare the sheep for the shearing, business as usual.

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What Was the Real Relationship Between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates? How a young neuroscientist became a connection between the Microsoft co-founder and the pedophile financier
by Vicky Ward
Rolling Stone
August 3, 2021
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/cu ... n-1206453/

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Rick Friedman/Corbis/Getty Images; zz/PBG/AAD/STAR MAX/IPx/AP

As the world now knows, one of the more surprising names to have popped up around Jeffrey Epstein is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

It’s been widely reported that Gates had flown on Epstein’s plane at least once, and visited his home multiple times — but the depth of their relationship is not fully known, and more details are emerging. The media is rife with speculation that one cause of Gates’ recent divorce from his wife Melinda was his relationship with Epstein.

When asked about how they met, a spokesperson for the Gates Foundation told me that many people encouraged Gates to meet with Epstein, suggesting that Epstein would help bring funds into the software entrepreneur’s famed philanthropic organization.

In 2019, Gates was quoted as saying, at the New York Times DealBook conference, “I made a mistake in judgment in that I thought those discussions would lead literally to billions of dollars going to global health. Turned out that was a bad judgment, that was a mirage.” He also admitted, “I gave him some benefit by the association.” 

So, here’s what I know from my reporting that takes this story further. 

In Bill Gates’ case, one conduit to him was a protégé of Epstein’s: Her name is Melanie S. Walker. 

Walker is a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon who became a top adviser to Gates at his Foundation and after that, became a senior adviser at the World Bank. The Gates Foundation placed her at the international financial institution in a somewhat-common arrangement called a secondment. What that means is the Foundation paid her salary — even though she was working for the World Bank. 

She found herself in such echelons in an intriguing way: Walker came from a working class family in Texas; as she reached adulthood, she was beautiful and bright. Having finished her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas, she was on a sightseeing trip to New York in 1992. She was having tea in the main dining room of the Plaza Hotel when Jeffrey Epstein approached, because, says a source with knowledge, he thought she was attractive. With him was Donald Trump, who was busy shaking hands with people in the room. (Trump was then the Plaza’s owner.) Trump also introduced himself to Walker.

Epstein then became a mentor to Walker. Walker told the Times that Epstein offered her a modeling opportunity — but the person familiar says Epstein told her not to go into modeling, and he encouraged her to finish medical school, which she did. 

From 1992 to 2000, the time period when she went to medical school in Texas, records show that she listed an address in a New York apartment building that Epstein owned. This was a place she could use for occasional meetings in New York, according to the person familiar with her. But, this person says, she didn’t live there.

According to a source with knowledge, in 1998, while she was pursuing a post-doctoral study at Cal Tech, Epstein hired her as his “Science Advisor.” She would later tell people who then spoke to me, that she felt a deep gratitude toward Epstein, both for his advice and for the job.

A source who was friendly with Epstein then recalls her role as providing Epstein with introductions to interesting faculty members at Cal Tech and elsewhere — people whose work he might be interested in funding. This person recalls meeting her at a dinner at Epstein’s house in New York. Her relationship with Epstein seemed only professional to this observer.

Around the same time, she and Prince Andrew became close friends. But not through Epstein, at least according to a source with knowledge. The story goes, according to that source, that Walker received a spare ticket to a Broadway show from a different friend and sat next to Prince Andrew.

In the early 2000s, she found herself in Seattle, and for the first time, the orbit of Bill Gates — this was after she moved in with an executive at Microsoft. His name is Steven Sinofsky. According to an eyewitness, Sinofsky brought Walker to Microsoft events, and at a company barbecue, she met the Microsoft founder. 

In 2006, she was hired by the Gates Foundation, partly so she would stay in Seattle along with Sinofsky, says a person familiar. A separate source says during this time Walker talked highly about Epstein. 

Meanwhile, two other people close to Gates and to Walker — the physician Boris Nikolic and the scientist Nathan Myhrvold — had also met Epstein and also talked up Epsein to Gates, says this source. In 2010 Gates announced the Giving Pledge: a commitment by the world’s richest individuals and families to give away the majority of their wealth – and he wanted to connect with as many of these types of people as possible.

At this time some of the people at the Gates Foundation had gotten the impression from Epstein that he was a billionaire and therefore a potential contributor to the Giving Pledge and that his time in prison in 2009 was mostly undeserved. Epstein had told them that he simply caught a bad rap for an experience with women who had lied about their age.

Sources say Nikolic was impressed with Epstein’s ideas for fundraising, as was Gates, who met Epstein in early 2011 at a dinner, according to the New York Times. Sources say Gates wasn’t aware that Epstein did not have the sort of money he claimed to have, until much later. 

Gates and Epstein worked together on a global health fund. Everything went well — until, according to the New York Times’ description of a pitch document, Epstein asked a cut of any donations that he had helped facilitate from high-net-worth individuals. Gates and the people around him never finalized the plans because, according to someone with knowledge, once the lawyers looked at it, all sorts of warning bells went off. This may have been a factor in Gates ultimately dropping Epstein. 

But, Epstein apparently wasn’t so easy to shake off. Sources describe him like a mollusk at elite global philanthropic gatherings — to which he wasn’t invited.

Nikolic would subsequently run into Epstein a few times a year — either at Davos World Economic Forum, which Epstein wouldn’t attend but rented a chalet nearby; or at Ted conferences, where he was also wouldn’t enter, but where Epstein, regardless, set up camp; or at Harvard, where Nikolic worked. The encounters, according to the source, were brief and pleasant. 

Nothing materialized from his outreach to Gates; sources say Epstein made a final “fuck you” to Gates two days before he died. At this moment, he appointed Nikolic as a substitute executor of his will. Nikolic says he had had no meaningful contact with Epstein for years — so, the move could have been designed to shine a light on the Gates/Epstein relationship, with the full knowledge that it could be extraordinarily damaging to Gates’ reputation. I reached out to Nikolic who told me in an email exchange he had fainted at his mother’s wake when heard of his appointment and that “it was absolutely a retaliatory move”. 

He added: “Over the past few years, we have all learned that Epstein was a master deceiver. I now see that his philanthropic proposals were designed to ingratiate himself with my colleagues and me in an attempt to further his own social and financial ambitions. When he failed to achieve his goals, he started to retaliate.” Nikolic sought legal advice and declined his executor duties. 

Walker, meanwhile, has got on with her work as a neurosurgeon, and Gates, as we know, has gotten divorced. But the story serves as a warning perhaps that one should assume that the world of philanthropy is every bit as susceptible to high-flying power-plays as the for-profit world — and that a determined crook like Jeffrey Epstein can get a lot of undeserved credibility by associating with distinguished people on the inside.

Vicky Ward is the host of audible.com/ghislaine Chasing Ghislaine, an Audible Original podcast, executive-produced by James Patterson, released on July 15th.

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Part 1 of 2

How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. A Times investigation found that America’s leading bank spent years supporting — and profiting from — the notorious sex offender, ignoring red flags, suspicious activity and concerned executives.
by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg
New York Times
Sept. 8, 2025
https://web.archive.org/web/20250908124 ... organ.html

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Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie and Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times

The reporters, who started investigating Epstein more than six years ago, reviewed more than 13,000 of pages of legal and financial records for this article.

One day in October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein walked into the cavernous lobby of 270 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The skyscraper was home to JPMorgan Chase, arguably the world’s most prestigious bank. The sex offender — who barely a year earlier was under house arrest after serving 13 months in a Florida jail — was ushered onto an elevator and whisked to a top floor where Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, and the rest of the senior leadership had their offices.

Epstein had long been a treasured customer at JPMorgan. His accounts were brimming with more than $200 million. He generated millions of dollars in revenue for the bank, landing him atop an internal list of major money makers. He helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He helped executives troubleshoot crises and strategize about global opportunities.

But a growing group of employees worried that JPMorgan’s association with a man who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime — and was under federal investigation for human trafficking — could harm the bank’s reputation. Just as troubling, anti-money-laundering specialists within the bank noticed Epstein’s pattern of withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars in cash virtually every month. These were red flags for illicit activity.

That was why Epstein was at the bank’s headquarters. JPMorgan’s top executive in charge of ensuring compliance with laws and regulations had already pushed to fire him as a client. Now Stephen Cutler, a former federal securities regulator and the bank’s general counsel, had added his voice to the chorus.

Epstein’s chief defender at the bank was Jes Staley, a top contender to one day succeed Dimon as chief executive. Staley persuaded Cutler to sit down with Epstein and “hear him out.” It was a high-stakes meeting for Epstein; his close ties to JPMorgan had been invaluable in his quest for money, influence and legitimacy. The bank lent him money. Staley dished confidential information to him. At Epstein’s behest, JPMorgan set up accounts — into which he routinely transferred huge sums — for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations. It wired his funds overseas. It even paid him millions of dollars.


Jes Staley, once the leading contender to succeed Jamie Dimon as chief executive of JP Morgan, repeatedly went to bat for Jeffrey Epstein at the bank. James Manning/PA Images, via Getty Images

Epstein’s crimes have been exhaustively documented, and elements of JPMorgan’s relationship with Epstein have become public via legal proceedings in the United States and Britain. But the full story of how America’s leading lender enabled the century’s most notorious sexual predator has not been told. This account has been pieced together from thousands of pages of internal bank records, sealed deposition transcripts and other court documents and financial data, as well as interviews with people with direct knowledge of the Epstein relationship. Among the findings: Bank officials for more than a decade were anxious about Epstein’s prolific wire transfers and cash withdrawals — JPMorgan ultimately processed more than $1 billion in such transactions for him — and warned senior management about his suspicious activities. But on at least four occasions over five years, the bank’s leaders overrode those objections and continued to serve Epstein.

Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for JPMorgan, said in a statement that the bank’s relationship with Epstein “was a mistake and in hindsight we regret it, but we did not help him commit his heinous crimes.” He added, “We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was engaged in an ongoing sex trafficking operation.” The bank has pinned blame for the scandal on Staley, a trusted confidant to Dimon. “We now know that trust was misplaced,” Evangelisti said.

Tales of greed trumping ethics and morals are older than Wall Street itself, and the story of how and why JPMorgan spent years serving Epstein is a case study in that dynamic. But it is instructive in other ways as well. More than six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, where he was awaiting prosecution on federal sex-trafficking charges, mysteries continue to swirl around how Epstein amassed and deployed money and influence on a grand scale. Over time, those mysteries curdled into conspiracy theories — most of them unsubstantiated — that placed Epstein at the center of a vast global pedophilia ring or as a foreign intelligence operative compiling dirt on the rich and powerful. The Trump administration’s refusal to release files gathered by federal investigators as they built a case against Epstein — aside from unsuccessfully seeking to unseal an F.B.I. agent’s grand-jury testimony — has only added to the frenzied speculation.

In Epstein’s lengthy alliance with JPMorgan, we found a more mundane, if no less damning, explanation for Epstein’s remarkable success. He was, in the words of one friend, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, “a collector of people.” He used those relationships to cultivate new connections and establish his legitimacy. He traded favors and gossip and advice. He created an aura of indispensability and of being so plugged-in that he bordered on omniscience — traits that made him a vital asset for a worldwide cast of government and business leaders. That, in turn, gave Epstein access to more money and connections that he could use to power his criminal activities.

But in 2011, this edifice of power and influence was at risk of crumbling. His conviction and incarceration led some of his powerful friends to back away and threatened to leave him an outcast from the financial world. His relationship with JPMorgan was therefore more important than ever. The fact that he remained a client in good standing conferred on him respectability and helped him foster new ties to corporate elites. He was determined not to blow it. Sitting in Cutler’s office that autumn afternoon, Epstein assured the general counsel that he had “turned over a new leaf.” And he rattled off names of prominent figures who, he told Cutler, could vouch for his character. “Go talk to Bill Gates about me,” Epstein said at one point.

Afterward, Cutler sat alone, trying to figure out what to do. He kept brooding for weeks. Epstein struck him as a smooth operator; it wasn’t hard to imagine him charming powerful people. Yet Cutler didn’t see how he would be able to explain to his female colleagues that JPMorgan was keeping Epstein as a client, he would later say. After a second conversation with Epstein, he informed Staley that he still thought the bank should cut ties.

But the recommendation came with crucial caveats. Cutler considered his primary job to be protecting JPMorgan from legal risks, and from his perspective, the Epstein relationship was a threat to the bank’s reputation. He did not see evidence that Epstein was using his accounts for criminal purposes. As a result, he would not insist that the bank expel him as a client. Nor would he escalate the matter to Dimon, the chief executive.

And so Epstein was allowed to stay.


Jamie Dimon has said he did not “recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein” until 2019, even though his subordinates were fighting over whether to keep him as a client. Credit...Tom Williams/Associated Press

The story of JPMorgan’s relationship with Epstein begins in the late 1990s in the canyons of Manhattan’s financial district. Epstein was in his 40s, a college dropout who briefly worked on Wall Street before becoming a high school math teacher, and he had a gift for making it seem as if he belonged. He had gone on to advise and manage money for some big-name clients. In 1985, he opened a bank account at a company that is now part of JPMorgan, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later, as his wealth and renown grew, that he began getting noticed at the bank.

A JPMorgan client suggested to Sandy Warner, the bank’s chief executive at the time and a titan of American finance, that he meet this up-and-comer. Warner invited Epstein to a meeting in his 20th-floor office in the bank’s neoclassical headquarters at 60 Wall Street. (JPMorgan would move to Midtown a couple of years later.) The pair talked about markets and policy, Warner recalled in an interview. Epstein presented himself as a heavyweight, claiming to manage money for the Rockefellers.

That meeting was followed by a well-attended gathering at Epstein’s Manhattan home. Warner today insists that he was immediately creeped out by Epstein. Even so, he phoned one of his lieutenants to encourage him to meet Epstein, “who drops 50 names in an hourlong conversation.” That lieutenant was Jes Staley.

Staley had joined JPMorgan in 1979 after graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine with an economics degree. He worked for the bank in Brazil, where he met his future wife, and then relocated to New York. His star rose rapidly inside the storied investment bank. In 1999, Warner promoted him to run JPMorgan’s private-banking division, which catered to ultrawealthy clients. Not long after, at Warner’s urging, Staley visited Epstein at his office in an old mansion across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. It was the beginning of a long, fateful friendship. (Staley, as well as some other current and former senior bank executives, did not respond to our questions or declined to comment for this article.)

Epstein was on his way to becoming one of JPMorgan’s most important clients. A 2003 internal report pegged his net worth at about $300 million. The report, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, noted that Epstein’s occupation was advising wealthy individuals like Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire operator of brands like Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, though bank documents at the time did not list any other clients. That year, JPMorgan attributed more than $8 million in fees to Epstein, making him the biggest revenue generator among investor clients in the private-banking division.

But the report overlooked something that, had it been taken seriously, might have dimmed the bank’s enthusiasm. In 2003, Epstein withdrew more than $175,000 in cash from his JPMorgan accounts — a huge haul, even for someone with millions at the bank. Outside investigators later found that Epstein paid almost that exact amount to women that year. JPMorgan recognized that those withdrawals needed to be reported to federal regulators that monitor large cash transactions. But the bank failed to treat those withdrawals as an early-warning system for itself. Indeed, JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering specialists subsequently acknowledged that such withdrawals should have alerted the bank to the possibility that Epstein was committing crimes.

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JPMorgan did financial work for Epstein’s company that handled the affairs of his private island Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank later paid settlements to victims who were sexually abused there.Credit...Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images

JPMorgan, however, was all in. Soon it opened accounts not just for Epstein but also for his companies, including one that handled the affairs of his private island, Little Saint James, off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank also provided financial backing for Epstein to help Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout who had been the subject of media reports about drugging and raping women, start a modeling agency called MC2. JPMorgan would ultimately open at least 134 accounts for Epstein, his companies and his associates.

Wittingly or not, the bank was supporting important cogs in Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and have sex with him. Some of Epstein’s underage victims said MC2 lured them to the United States with the prospect of paid modeling work. (In 2022, Brunel died by suicide in a French jail cell after being charged with raping teenage girls.)

The millions of dollars in fees that Epstein was paying the bank was only part of his allure. Arguably more important, he was identifying potential new clients and business opportunities. In 2003, for example, he introduced Staley to Brin, the co-founder of Google and one of the world’s richest men. Brin hired JPMorgan to help manage his immense fortune — he would eventually park more than $4 billion in assets at the bank — a decision that Staley credited to Epstein. Staley later said in a deposition that a parade of other Epstein referrals — including to Gates, Elon Musk and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati billionaire — followed, though not all became clients.

Just as JPMorgan landed Brin, Epstein made an even more consequential contribution to the bank’s growth. Hedge funds were all the rage among America’s rich, and Staley thought that if he could offer clients access to these investment vehicles, it would help distinguish JPMorgan from rivals. As it happened, Epstein had a useful point of contact: Glenn Dubin, who co-founded a $7 billion hedge fund called Highbridge Capital Management, and his wife, Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Miss Sweden whom Epstein once dated. Epstein was the godfather to the Dubins’ daughter, and photographs and paintings of the girl were ubiquitous in Epstein’s colossal Upper East Side townhouse. (Epstein would later name Andersson-Dubin as a beneficiary of his estate. Her lawyer said she learned she was a beneficiary only after his death and rejected the bequest.)

In 2004, with Epstein acting as middleman, JPMorgan agreed to pay $1.3 billion for a controlling stake in Highbridge. The acquisition would turn into a landmark for the bank — and for Staley, who described it as “probably the most important transaction in my professional career.” Staley, who by then was running JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management business, was soon reporting to Dimon, the bank’s No. 2 executive and C.E.O.-in-waiting.

Epstein, for his part in arranging the Highbridge deal, pocketed a $15 million fee from the hedge fund that JPMorgan now controlled. The payout reflected a crucial reality: Epstein was the rarest of customers, one whose moneymaking potential extended far beyond his own accounts. It was imperative to keep this superclient happy.

A few months later, in early 2005, Staley emailed an underling in the private bank about bringing on another new client. Her name was Ghislaine Maxwell. She was Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and remained entwined in his life. (She would later be convicted of playing a central role in his sex-trafficking operations and is serving a 20-year sentence.) “Ghislaine is a good friend of one of our very big clients in the US,” Staley wrote. “Can we please try to help her.” Epstein later transferred millions of dollars into Maxwell’s JPMorgan account, including $7.4 million to buy a green Sikorsky helicopter to fly people to Little Saint James.


Epstein’s waterfront home in Palm Beach, Fla., was the site of the sex crime he was charged with in 2008. Even after he was a registered sex offender, JPMorgan did not end its relationship with him.Credit...Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images

By then, Epstein’s abuse of young women and girls was attracting the notice of law enforcement. In March 2005, the parents of a 14-year-old girl filed a complaint with the police in Palm Beach, Fla., alleging that Epstein had molested her. The police opened an investigation, and soon other teenage girls shared similar stories of abuse. (Women have subsequently accused Epstein of raping them as teenagers as far back as 1985.)

Even before the investigation became public, warning lights should have been flashing inside JPMorgan. Epstein’s huge cash withdrawals continued — a total of more than $1.7 million in 2004 and 2005, according to records we reviewed — much of which was used to procure girls and young women. Some of the withdrawals took place at the bank branch in JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, where Epstein’s accountant regularly arrived to cash huge checks written from Epstein’s various accounts.

At Epstein’s request, the private bank also agreed to open accounts for two young women without actually speaking to either of them. Instead, one of Epstein’s minions provided bare-bones information, and JPMorgan couldn’t confirm one woman’s Social Security number. A banker was supposed to meet with the woman to verify her details but never did, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Virgin Islands, which later sued JPMorgan. (Evangelisti, the bank spokesman, said the accounts “were properly verified and documented.”)

Decades of scandals — in which banks facilitated drug smuggling, human trafficking, money laundering, terrorism and even genocide — gave rise to requirements that lenders vet their customers, closely monitor their activities and flag suspicious transactions to the government. Among its many lapses with Epstein, JPMorgan often failed to alert federal watchdogs to transactions that the bank later acknowledged were suspicious. And by opening accounts for young women without meeting them, the bank was missing a well-known hallmark of human traffickers: that they control victims’ interactions with the outside world.

Not until Epstein was arrested and indicted in July 2006 on charges of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl did JPMorgan start paying more attention. In a deposition in 2023, Staley said that he phoned Dimon to tell him an important client had just been indicted and that the two executives later met in person to discuss the situation. (Dimon has denied this under oath.) “So painful to read,” Mary Erdoes, who had succeeded Staley at the helm of the private bank, emailed her boss, attaching an article about the indictment. Staley responded that he had just met with Epstein the previous night. “I’ve never seen him so shaken,” he typed on his BlackBerry, saying that Epstein “adamantly denies” being involved with girls.


Mary Erdoes, a top JPMorgan executive, signed off on a new loan to Epstein months after his indictment in Florida on a charge of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl. Credit...Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

In private, Staley and Erdoes seemed to make light of their client’s predilections. That August, Staley attended a Hamptons fund-raiser and was struck by the crowd’s composition. “The ages between husband and wives would have fit in well with Jeffrey,” he told Erdoes in an email. She replied that Epstein’s name had come up at an event the night before. An acquaintance noted how another prominent New York businessman liked to surround himself with beautiful assistants. “Lots of comparisons to JE,” Erdoes wrote, adding that people were “laughing about Jeffrey.”

JPMorgan pulled together a team to decide what to do about their indicted but lucrative client. Around this time, the Justice Department charged another bank customer, the actor Wesley Snipes, with tax fraud. JPMorgan quickly kicked Snipes out of the bank, according to sealed court records we reviewed. (Snipes was later convicted on tax-related misdemeanors but acquitted of more serious fraud charges.)

But the Florida sex-crime charge against Epstein — even when coupled with news that the Justice Department had opened its own investigation into his activities — didn’t lead to a similar result. The team assigned to the Epstein matter noted his suspicious pattern of large cash withdrawals but, after discussing things with Staley and Erdoes, opted to keep him as a client. The one condition: JPMorgan “will not proactively solicit new investment business from him,” an internal memo said. But that did not preclude continuing to lend him money. The following year, Erdoes signed off on a new loan to Epstein. “I am relieved to hear,” a banker wrote after learning that Erdoes had approved the new credit line despite concerns raised by others within the bank.

Much of the paper trail was in email exchanges. Below are excerpts.

From: Mary Erdoes
To: Jes Staley
Subject:
Re: epstein press

so painful to read

From: Jes Staley
To: Mary Erdoes
Subject:
Re: epstein press

I went and saw him last night. I’ve never seen him so shaken. He also adamantly denies the ages.

In 2008, the situation again seemed to grow untenable. A parade of victims had sued Epstein for sexually abusing them, and the ugly details in the court filings caught the attention of JPMorgan executives. Then, in June, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor and was sentenced to 18 months in the Palm Beach County jail. It was a sweetheart deal — among other things, he avoided prosecution on more serious allegations — but even so, he was now a felon and a sex offender. The bank’s general counsel was supposed to sign off on doing business with felons.

The rank and file in the private-banking division pushed to expel Epstein. “No one wants him,” a banker noted in an email. The decision was made to tell Staley that “we are uncomfortable with Epstein” and that they shouldn’t bother going to Cutler, who had become general counsel the previous year after being the top enforcement officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. They should just boot him out of the bank.

Staley later testified under oath that he alerted Dimon to Epstein’s guilty plea and that Dimon told him to talk to Cutler. Staley made no secret about his desire to retain his star customer, and when he and Cutler met, “the decision was made to keep Mr. Epstein as a PB client,” according to an internal write-up. Around that time, as two executives in the private bank emailed about whether Epstein’s accounts would be closed, one of them said the decision was “pending Dimon review.” Another internal email noted that Cutler was reviewing Epstein-related documents “for Jamie.” Yet in his own sworn deposition, Dimon said he did not “recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein” until 2019.

Regardless of who made the decision, Epstein remained a client — “no change to relationship approach” was the final verdict — and even during his jail sentence, JPMorgan continued wiring money from his accounts to banks in Russia and Eastern Europe, where young women were being drawn into his sex-trafficking network, according to sealed court records.

All the while, Staley was regularly backchanneling with his buddy. “I hope you’re hanging in there,” Staley wrote at one point. “Just think of the island and my boat anchored in front.” (Staley had a 90-foot yacht, Bequia, named after the Caribbean island on which he and his wife honeymooned.)

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Staley sailed his 90-foot yacht, Bequia, to stay on Epstein’s private island in 2011, telling Epstein it was “paradise.”Credit...Bing Guan/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

When Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed in late 2008, Erdoes asked Staley to call Epstein “to get the scoop” about how wealthy clients in the Palm Beach area were faring. Around the same time, a rumor was circulating that Dimon might become the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration — in which case Staley would be a prime contender to succeed him as chief executive. Staley emailed Epstein about Dimon’s status. Epstein responded, “We can help push Obama.”

Epstein was a master manipulator who sometimes exaggerated or lied about his access and power. It is not clear whether he had sway with officials in Barack Obama’s inner circle at the time, though he and a top Obama economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, were friendly. In any case, there is no question that Staley and at least some of his colleagues trusted Epstein.

Staley at times shared confidential information. As the world descended into a deep financial crisis in 2008, Staley divulged to Epstein that the bank was trying to buy one company and sell another. The next month, he revealed that JPMorgan’s private bank had been inundated by $44 billion in new assets in the past two weeks. He disclosed that JPMorgan was working on a deal for the Pritzker family, and he detailed the bank’s talks with the Federal Reserve about how to stabilize the financial system. Over and over, Staley passed what he later acknowledged was potentially market-moving information to a criminal.

Epstein cultivated relationships with other JPMorgan bankers and executives, and it is possible that Staley was not the only one leaking to the sex offender. In the fall of 2009 — barely two months after Epstein was released from jail and began a period of home arrest — he learned that Staley was in line for a big promotion, this time to run JPMorgan’s investment-banking division. He seemed to know more about Staley’s future than Staley did. “I am told you are on track,” Epstein wrote more than three weeks before Staley was formally tapped for the job.

The public announcement made clear that Staley was now the front-runner to one day inherit Dimon’s throne. “Jes has impeccable character and integrity,” Dimon told Fortune magazine. (When Bin Sulayem emailed Epstein about Staley’s promotion, Epstein implied that he himself had masterminded it.) Staley immediately began turning to Epstein for advice. How much should he earn in the new gig? How should he handle the job transition? What should his priorities be? To that last question, Epstein urged Staley to embrace China, perhaps by moving some banking operations there. He arranged for Staley to get “a quick tutorial” about China from an Oxford-educated expert.

What did Epstein get out of this? Clearly he wanted to endear himself to bank executives. But there was more to it. In his New York townhouse, Epstein kept framed stock certificates of iconic American companies like General Motors, AT&T and JPMorgan. A felon and sex offender under house arrest, he was at risk of becoming a pariah. Yet he was also proving indispensable to top executives at one of the world’s premier banks. The intimate relationship imbued him with prestige in the eyes of those he hoped to impress.

Staley would later be asked under oath why Epstein introduced him to the China expert. “Epstein relied on his network for his legitimacy,” Staley answered. “And I, as running the largest investment bank in the world, was part of that network for him.”


While Epstein was serving his sentence in Florida, Staley visited his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. “I owe you much,” Staley wrote to Epstein from the ranch’s hot tub.Credit...Drone Base/Reuters

One of the enduring mysteries about Epstein is why so many rich and powerful men risked their reputations by continuing to spend time with him after he was registered as a sex offender. Did they value his advice? Consider him a friend? Like tapping into his network? Or was it about sex with the young women who always seemed to be around him?

At least with Staley, the answer might have been all of the above. While Epstein was under house arrest in November 2009, Staley visited his sprawling Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, where girls and young women later accused Epstein of raping and trafficking them. (Epstein also discussed using the desert compound as a venue for inseminating women in order to seed the human race with his DNA.) Staley emailed Epstein while sipping white wine in the hot tub. “Next time, we’re here together,” he wrote. “I owe you much.” Other messages were littered with apparent sexual references. “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White,” Staley emailed in 2010. Epstein responded by asking which character he would like next. “Beauty and the Beast,” Staley answered.

From: Jes Staley
To: Jeffrey Epstein
Subject:
Re:

That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.

From: Jeffrey Epstein
To: Jes Staley
Subject:
Re:

which character would you like next

From: Jes Staley
To: Jeffrey Epstein
Subject: Re:

Beauty and the Beast …

One day around then, while visiting Epstein’s New York townhouse for a meeting, Staley had a conversation with a woman in her 20s. She had been with Epstein since around 2003, making her one of the longest-serving women in the retinue that surrounded Epstein. The woman would later allege in a class-action lawsuit, which was eventually settled, that Epstein sexually abused her for more than a dozen years and that he forced her and other victims to engage in commercial sex with “certain select friends.”

According to Staley, the woman suggested that he come by her apartment in an Upper East Side building owned by Epstein’s brother. On the appointed day, Staley arrived, and after chatting in the living room, they went to her bedroom and had sex. Afterward, Staley took a shower. He was out of the building in less than an hour and walked back to work. (Staley, who is married, has publicly acknowledged having sex with one of Epstein’s assistants, but the details have not previously been reported. Staley swore in a deposition that it was his only Epstein-connected sexual encounter.)

Late in 2010, JPMorgan approved $50 million of additional credit to facilitate market trading by Epstein, whose criminal history would have rendered him untouchable at many mainstream banks. By now, he had about $212 million at the bank, nearly half of his estimated net worth. Yet fresh concerns were brewing.

Employees in JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering division learned from media reports that the Justice Department was investigating whether Brunel’s MC2 modeling agency was feeding Eastern European girls and women into Epstein’s suspected sex-trafficking network. Plus, there were Epstein’s regular wire transfers, the credit cards and bank accounts he requested for teenagers and young women and his voluminous cash withdrawals. The anti-money-laundering employees were waking up, even if they didn’t grasp the significance of what they were seeing. “Sugar Daddy!” one exclaimed after noting that Epstein had sent about $450,000 to an 18-year-old.

From:
To: William D Langford
Subject: Jeffrey Epstein

One is mentioned in many of the recaps of the escapades as a willing participant and assistant when hosting visitors. She has received about 450,000 since opening from Epstein… The willing participant had some lovely debit charges and spends a good deal at spa establishments. He did pay other girls, many models no huge amounts. Sugar Daddy!

The bank’s head of compliance, William Langford, was especially alarmed. “No patience for this,” he emailed a colleague. Langford had joined JPMorgan in 2006 after years of policing financial crimes for the Treasury Department. He knew — and had warned colleagues — that companies can be criminally charged for money laundering if they willfully ignored such activities by their clients. He saw ultrawealthy customers as a particular blind spot; all the time that private bankers spent wining and dining these lucrative clients could cloud judgments about their trustworthiness. It looked like that was what was happening with Epstein. One of Langford’s achievements at JPMorgan was the creation of a task force devoted to combating human trafficking. The group noted in a presentation that frequent large cash withdrawals and wire transfers — exactly what employees were seeing in Epstein’s accounts — were totems of such illicit activity.

Early in the new year, Langford approached Erdoes, who was now running JPMorgan’s asset-and-wealth-management group. He told her that Epstein should be “exited.” Erdoes, however, said Staley was responsible for the Epstein relationship — an odd deflection, because Staley now worked in the investment-banking division, which didn’t control Epstein’s private-banking accounts. Yet JPMorgan’s “rapid response” team — activated at Langford’s urging — reached a similar conclusion: Langford should talk to Staley, because he “is friends with Epstein. He needs to understand the potential backlash to the firm given all of the work done to root out clients involved in human trafficking.”

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Staley, Erdoes and other JPMorgan employees were among the visitors to Epstein’s palatial townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.Credit...Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

The meeting took place in January 2011. Staley by then had a reputation for running interference on Epstein’s behalf, repeatedly telling colleagues that he would trust Epstein with his daughters. (He meant it literally: Staley arranged for Epstein to coach one of his daughters on her education and career.) Now he allotted all of 15 minutes for the discussion with Langford. Langford said in a deposition that he started off by quickly explaining the human-trafficking initiative. In that context, how could the bank justify working with someone who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime and was now under investigation for sex trafficking?

Staley pushed back, saying that Epstein hoped to get his plea deal overturned in court. He told Langford to speak with Epstein’s attorneys. Langford was surprised — he had never spoken to a client’s criminal lawyer — but a month later, he got on the phone with Ken Starr, the former special prosecutor who pursued Bill Clinton for his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and who was now representing Epstein. “Got all my points in,” Starr reported to his client afterward. “I said, no crimes, period. Inappropriate, yes. criminal, no. Bragged on you.”

At the request of Langford and other executives, Staley asked Epstein whether he was involved in sex trafficking. According to an internal bank memo, Epstein replied that “there was no truth to the allegations” and that he “was not expecting any problems” from law enforcement. Staley seemed to believe him.

Langford now had a choice. He could make a fuss about Epstein by talking to Dimon, appealing to the bank’s board of directors, pushing Staley or going back to Erdoes. But, he said in the deposition, he did none of those things.

That week, Staley sailed his yacht to Little Saint James. Epstein was on his way to Paris, and Staley emailed to let him know that the island was “paradise.” Days later, JPMorgan agreed to keep Epstein as a client.

Staley and at least one other executive alerted Epstein to the bank’s heightened sensitivity about his constant cash withdrawals. Apparently in response, Epstein altered his tactics. Instead of taking cash out of his personal accounts, he withdrew money from a JPMorgan account for Hyperion Air, which owned Epstein’s jets. In 2012, for example, nearly $300,000 was withdrawn from Hyperion’s account, more than enough to cover Epstein’s roughly $225,000 in payments to procure women that year, according to records we reviewed. Epstein told executives in the private bank that the withdrawals were to pay for jet fuel and other aviation expenses.

Where was all this money coming from? Epstein’s nine-figure fortune derived from multiple sources. Much originated with Wexner, the Limited founder who, to the everlasting bafflement of his friends, granted Epstein power over his personal finances and would later accuse him of misappropriating huge sums. After that billionaire cut ties to Epstein around 2007, tens of millions of dollars poured in from another billionaire, Leon Black, a founder of the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management; Black, himself a JPMorgan client, said the payments were for Epstein’s advice about taxes and estate planning.

And then there was JPMorgan. In addition to giving Epstein crucial access to the global financial system, the bank directly enriched him. There was $15 million from the Highbridge acquisition. And in 2011, even as senior officials like Langford wanted Epstein out, the bank paid him an additional $9 million. It was to settle a lawsuit that Epstein had brought years earlier against the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns, which JPMorgan bought in 2008. Erdoes went to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to discuss the settlement.

To Epstein’s critics, the resolution of the Bear Stearns litigation was a fresh chance for JPMorgan to cut off the sex offender. And those critics now had a powerful new ally: Cutler, the general counsel.

Back in 2008, Cutler had signed off on Epstein remaining a customer. Now things were different. “This is not an honorable person in any way,” Cutler emailed Erdoes, Staley and others in July 2011. “He should not be a client.” Staley, however, insisted that the relationship was safe. Surely, if billionaires and prime ministers trusted Epstein, so could JPMorgan. Plus, it was a matter of fairness. Epstein had served his time. He deserved a second chance, Staley argued.

From:
To:
Stephen Cutler, Mary Erdoes, Jes Staley and others
Subject:
Re: epstein press

I just conveyed to Mr. Epstein our response to his proposal to settle his High Grade Fund and Bear stock claims together for $21 million.

From: Stephen Cutler
To: Mary Erdoes, Jes Staley and others
Subject:
Re: epstein press

This is not an honorable person in any way. He should not be a client.

That was when Cutler invited Epstein to the bank’s headquarters for a meeting, the first of two conversations he had with the felon that fall. (Epstein also tried to arrange a meeting with Dimon, though there is no evidence that he was successful.) Around then, Cutler also learned that Epstein was classified as a Level 3 sex offender, meaning he had a high risk of committing additional crimes. Yet despite his misgivings, Cutler didn’t insist upon dismissing him.

It was another blown opportunity — and it showed how, despite the bank’s later attempts to pin the blame on Staley, responsibility for Epstein was shared across the institution. Executives like Cutler and Langford, while united in believing that he was a threat to the bank’s reputation, didn’t take a stand. Elsewhere in the bank, the combination of a thirst for profits and Epstein’s knack for making himself seem indispensable proved potent and hard to kick, the financial equivalent of a powerful narcotic.

Sure enough, just as more bank employees were losing patience with Epstein in 2011, he began dangling more goodies. That March, to the pleasant surprise of JPMorgan’s investment bankers in Israel, they were granted an audience with Netanyahu. The bankers informed Staley, who forwarded their email to Epstein with a one-word message: “Thanks.” (The bank spokesman said JPMorgan “neither needed nor sought Epstein’s help for meetings with any government leaders.”) And around that same time, Epstein presented an opportunity that, like the Highbridge deal years earlier, had the potential to be transformative.

This one involved Bill Gates, who had only recently entered Epstein’s orbit. In an apparent effort to ingratiate — and further entangle — himself with his bankers and the Microsoft co-founder, Epstein pitched Erdoes and Staley on creating an enormous investment and charitable fund with something like $100 billion in assets. The so-called donor-advised fund would be seeded with billions from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. More would come from JPMorgan clients. The bank would collect fees for administering the fund. Naturally, Epstein hoped to get a slice, too.

The idea gained traction inside JPMorgan — it was given the code name Project Molecule — but never came to fruition, apparently too big and complex to get off the ground. Epstein was frustrated, but in a few months he faced a much greater problem at the bank: His patron was suddenly on the outs.

From:
To: Jes Staley and one other
Subject:

Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Netanyahu.

From: Jes Staley
To: Jeffrey Epstein
Subject:
Fwd:

Thanks.

------ Forwarded message ------

Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Netanyahu.

From: Jeffrey Epstein
To: Jes Staley
Subject:
Re: Fwd:

surprisee suprise

Dimon had several core traits as the leader of America’s biggest bank. One was his willingness to micromanage; a 2010 profile in this magazine mentioned that “Dimon seemingly meddles in every detail.” The tendency is hard to square with his insistence that he didn’t know Epstein was a client even as his subordinates battled about the propriety of working with him. (As David Boies, one of the lawyers representing Epstein’s victims, told us, either Dimon knew about Epstein and lied in a sworn deposition or his subordinates kept him in the dark. “Neither is good,” Boies said.)

Another defining characteristic was Dimon’s habit of ruthlessly cycling through top executives. In 2009, Dimon pushed aside the two longtime executives running the investment-banking division and replaced them with Staley, who immediately became Dimon’s heir apparent. But by 2012, Staley was out of favor. That summer, in the wake of an investing fiasco that cost the bank billions, he learned that Dimon planned to shake up his leadership team — including by demoting him. (Dimon and others suspected that Staley had been leaking information about the so-called London Whale scandal to the media.)

Staley broke the bad news to Epstein, who had spent years nurturing his relationship with the would-be chief executive. Epstein devised a plan to salvage his investment. The British bank Barclays was searching for a new chief. Epstein enlisted a London power broker to plant seeds about Staley with senior bank officials. Staley was interviewed for the job, but it ultimately went to a Barclays executive. Six months later, in January 2013, Staley decided to leave JPMorgan after 33 years.

[x]
Stephen Cutler (second from right), JPMorgan’s general counsel, wanted the bank to cut ties with Epstein in 2011 but ultimately didn’t insist on it, and the relationship continued. Credit...Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Epstein’s days at the bank also were numbered. That same month, federal banking regulators issued a cease-and-desist order against JPMorgan for anti-money-laundering lapses, including not adequately monitoring its customers’ transactions and failing to report suspicious activities to the government. The order was part of a wave of government actions against the bank, and it prompted the compliance department to get more aggressive — including when it came to Epstein. As part of a broader effort to reduce risk in the private-banking division, his accounts were among those marked as ripe for elimination.

Epstein’s personal banker, Justin Nelson, balked; he prepared a memo trumpeting Epstein’s large volume of business with JPMorgan and noting that despite his status as a sex offender, he was “still clearly well-respected and trusted by some of the richest people in the world.” But when JPMorgan convened its latest meeting to determine Epstein’s future, the decision was made to kick him out of the bank.

In mid-July, Erdoes returned to Epstein’s townhouse. A deputy prepared talking points. Erdoes was to tell Epstein that “the repetitive nature of your cash transactions is a problem for us and our relationship with you.” Banking regulators had “a very low tolerance for cash activity when combined with your personal history.” These were essentially the same arguments that JPMorgan employees had made as far back as 2006. Finally, the bank was acting on them.

That fall, Epstein began moving his $176 million from JPMorgan to his new home at Deutsche Bank. (Years later, Deutsche would pay more than $100 million in settlements with victims and regulators who sued over the bank’s relationship with Epstein.) But JPMorgan was not ready to fully part ways with Epstein. He remained in regular contact with Nelson, his personal banker. A big reason was Epstein’s relationship with Leon Black, the private-equity billionaire. Epstein was acting as an intermediary between the bank and Black, trying to secure him loans and other financial services.

Erdoes and at least one other senior JPMorgan executive knew that Nelson was continuing to interact with Epstein, and for years after JPMorgan ostensibly washed its hands of its notorious client, the banker included Epstein in meetings with Black, showed up at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and even visited his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. It was a testament to Epstein’s remarkable staying power — and to JPMorgan’s inability, when potential profits were on the line, to just say no.

Staley and Epstein were both gone from JPMorgan, but they remained close. There were dinners at Epstein’s townhouse, supportive messages (“The strength of a Greek army was that its core held shoulder to shoulder, and would not flee or break,” Staley wrote to his friend in 2015. “That is us”) and a visit that year with his family to Epstein’s island. Later in 2015, Staley landed a plum job: the chief executive of Barclays. Given Epstein’s role in putting Staley on the bank’s radar three years earlier, he deserved at least partial credit for what would most likely be Staley’s final act.

For a spell, everyone was happy. But in the summer of 2019, Epstein was arrested on his plane after it landed at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking; he then died by suicide in his jail cell. Suddenly, investigators, journalists and others were racing to understand how this man had prospered for so many years. His longtime bank was an obvious place to look.

JPMorgan went into damage-control mode. It opened an internal review — code name: Project Jeep — and discussed Epstein at board meetings. Late that year, the bank did something it should have been doing all along: It filed a report with federal regulators that retroactively flagged as suspicious some 4,700 Epstein transactions — totaling more than $1.1 billion and including hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European women who were brought to the United States, according to investigators working for Senator Ron Wyden who have been digging into Epstein’s financial backers. Banks are required to file such reports in real time to alert law enforcement to things like money laundering, sex trafficking and drug dealing. Doing it after the fact might have provided JPMorgan with legal cover, but it did nothing to help identify Epstein’s crimes as they were happening.

The bank’s current and former executives began pointing fingers. Erdoes and others blamed Staley for pushing to keep Epstein as a client. (The bank even sued him; the litigation was settled under confidential terms.) Staley — who would resign from Barclays in 2021 and be barred from being an executive in the British financial-services industry after an investigation into his relationship with Epstein — faulted Erdoes and others. Dimon said under oath that the decision to keep Epstein ultimately rested with Cutler.

The fallout for JPMorgan has been limited. In 2023, it paid $290 million to settle a lawsuit brought by roughly 200 of Epstein’s victims and an additional $75 million to resolve related litigation brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands, where many of Epstein’s crimes took place. The payments were a rounding error for a company that raked in more than $50 billion in profits that year. (The bank didn’t admit wrongdoing and is trying to force its insurers to cover some of the litigation costs.) No regulator took action against JPMorgan. No executives lost their jobs. Dimon remains one of the most powerful bankers in the world.

The apparent impunity alarmed Bridgette Carr, a law professor and human-trafficking expert whom the U.S. Virgin Islands hired after Epstein’s death to analyze JPMorgan’s role. Carr concluded that the bank enabled his crimes. “I am deeply worried here that the ultimate message to other financial institutions is that they can keep serving traffickers,” she told us. “It’s still profitable to do that, given the lack of substantial consequences.”

Susan C. Beachy and Julie Tate contributed research.

Source photograph for photo illustration: Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office/Associated Press

Prop stylist: Heather Greene

David Enrich is a deputy investigations editor for The Times. He writes about law and business.

Matthew Goldstein is a Times reporter who covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and housing issues.

Jessica Silver-Greenberg is a Times investigative reporter writing about big business with a focus on health care. She has been a reporter for more than a decade.

[admin]

Part 2 of 2

Staley pushed JP Morgan to keep Epstein as client despite human trafficking concerns, court hears. Former Barclays boss told Jeffrey Epstein suspicious withdrawals from his account were being investigated
by Kalyeena Makortoff
Banking correspondent
The Guardian
Tue 11 Mar 2025 11.36 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... clays-bank


Former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley walks near the high court. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

The former bank boss Jes Staley pushed JP Morgan to keep Jeffrey Epstein as a client despite human trafficking concerns and told him suspicious withdrawals from his account were being investigated, a court has heard.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) put the allegations to the ex-chief executive of Barclays during his second day of witness testimony at the upper tribunal in London.

Staley, who resigned from Barclays in 2021, is trying to overturn the regulator’s decision to ban him from taking any senior roles in the UK financial sector after claiming he lied about the depth of his relationship with Epstein. Barclays declared to the regulator in a letter in 2019 that the two men “did not have a close relationship”.

Staley originally met Epstein in 2000 after he became head of JP Morgan’s private bank, where Epstein was a client, and continued their relationship after Staley was appointed to lead the investment bank in 2009.

The FCA’s lawyer Leigh-Ann Mulcahy KC presented the tribunal with a series of internal emails and notes from JP Morgan bosses, who were considering dumping Epstein as a client in 2011. The financier had been released from prison after being convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

In one, a senior boss in the compliance team said he had held a meeting with colleagues “to determine how to approach the issue with Jes Staley who is friends with Mr Epstein. He needs to understand the potential backlash to the firm given all the work done to root out clients involved in human trafficking”.

The court was also showed another note produced by JP Morgan bosses which said Staley had asked the bank’s top lawyer, Stephen Cutler, to “hear [Epstein] out”.

Mulcahy put to Staley that others at JP Morgan “appeared to be of the view … that you were the one pushing to retain Mr Epstein as a client”.

Staley denied the allegations saying “I don’t think that’s fair”, adding that while JP Morgan knew the two men had a relationship, the decision to exit a client such as Epstein was not his to make.

He admitted to putting Cutler in contact with Epstein’s lawyer, but said that if JP Morgan’s top lawyer “had wanted to let Epstein go as a client he had full latitude to do that and I would never stand in his way”.

Mulcahy also accused Staley of sharing confidential information with Epstein, particularly about how JP Morgan had concerns over human trafficking allegations against the financier and suspicious cash withdrawals from his account. She pointed to an email that Epstein subsequently sent to a senior boss in the private bank in September 2011, saying “Jes told me that there was [an issue] with reg cash with drawals [sic].”

Staley said that while he “was not part of managing the account” he did not deny that he told Epstein there were concerns about cash withdrawals.

Epstein died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial over charges on trafficking underage girls for sex.

Staley, who walked into court on Tuesday carrying the book The Prosecutor by Jack Fairweather – subtitled “One man’s battle to bring Nazis to justice” – was also asked about time he spent with Epstein over the years.

The court was shown a set of emails from November 2010, in which Epstein messaged Staley: “Petie and others in Paris this weekend”, to which Staley replied: “12pm at ur place[sic]. Is set.” Staley told the court he believed this to be a reference to former Labour business secretary Peter Mandelson – now UK ambassador to the US – whose contact with Epstein was detailed in court documents in 2023.

Staley was part of a draft list of high-profile invitees to Epstein’s birthday celebrations in 2010. That list, put together by Epstein’s assistant, also included: the American magician David Blaine; Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate Richard Axel and his wife; as well as Rolling Stones star Mick Jagger – but only “if he is in town”.

It is not clear if that list was fulfilled. Staley said he struggled to recall details about which of Epstein’s birthday events he attended.

He also told the court that most of his contact with the financier “was related to business”, but that “there was a friend side to it as well”, adding: “He became a friend.”

Staley will continue giving evidence until the end of the hearing, which is due to continue until Friday.

************************

Bank report details Peter Mandelson’s apparent contact with Jeffrey Epstein. JP Morgan report from 2019 found Epstein seemed to keep ‘particularly close relationship’ with Labour peer
by Rowena Mason Whitehall editor
The Guardian
Wed 21 Jun 2023 09.51 EDT


Peter Mandelson in 2009. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Court documents have shed light on the Labour former business secretary Peter Mandelson’s apparent contact with the disgraced businessman Jeffrey Epstein after the financier was convicted of procuring an underage girl for prostitution.

The document is a 2019 internal report on Epstein by JP Morgan bank, which had a 15-year relationship with the financier, and was filed to a New York court this week.

It found that Epstein appeared to “maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government”.

In 2008, Epstein was given an 18-month sentence after pleading guilty to procuring an underage girl. He served time at the private wing of the Palm Beach county stockade in Florida before being released on probation on 22 July 2009.

The JP Morgan report reveals that Epstein wrote to his private banker, Jes Staley, on 17 June 2009 in relation to Mandelson to say: “Peter will be staying at 71st over weekend, do you want to organize either you, or you and Jamie,, quiertly [sic],, up to you.” At the time, Lord Mandelson was business secretary in the government of Gordon Brown.

It also refers to an email from Mandelson, when he was still business secretary in March 2010, to Epstein saying: “Can Jes send me email on issues re Dodds/Volcker.” The request appears to relate to US regulations in the wake of the financial crisis.

The report also refers to two occasions on which Epstein said he was with “Petie”, which the bank interprets as a reference to Mandelson, in November 2010 and January 2011. Mandelson was out of the government by this point.

The Guardian has contacted Mandelson and a lawyer for the Duke of York for comment on the report. A spokesperson for the Labour peer said: “Lord Mandelson very much regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein. This connection has been a matter of public record for some time. He never had any kind of professional or business relationship with Epstein in any form.” It is understood Mandelson has no recollection or record of staying in Epstein’s house in New York in 2009.

Mandelson appears to have been introduced to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the tycoon Robert Maxwell. She is serving 20 years in prison in the US for assisting Epstein in sex trafficking underage girls.

The report also raises questions about Prince Andrew’s claim to have cut ties with Epstein in December 2010. The royal’s friendship with Epstein has been criticised, particularly after he stayed with Epstein during a December 2010 visit to New York, which the Duke of York has said was to tell him that they could no longer be in contact.

However, the JP Morgan report states that in February 2011, two months after the Central Park meeting, Epstein wrote to Staley: “Andrew asked for your London schedule.”

Last year, the Duke of York settled a sexual assault case filed against him by Virginia Giuffre for an undisclosed sum, but with no admission of liability. Giuffre was introduced to him through Epstein and Maxwell.

In 2019, federal prosecutors charged Epstein with sex trafficking a minor and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. Epstein denied the charges and was refused bail. He died months later in custody in an apparent suicide.

The JP Morgan report was commissioned to examine the extent of the bank’s relations with Epstein, which continued until 2013.

Mandelson has given informal advice to the current Labour leadership. A spokesperson for the party said: “There are a whole range of people that Keir Starmer talks to. Obviously he talks to people who were part of the last Labour government, including Peter Mandelson.”

****************

JPMorgan’s Relationship with Epstein Reveals a Dark American Truth. The bank continued to do business with Epstein as investigators were running him to ground.
by Charles P. Pierce
Esquire
Published: Sep 09, 2025 4:08 PM EDT


ALEX WROBLEWSKI//Getty Images

There are not many words you can use to describe how much influence Jeffrey Epstein accumulated among the country’s power elites without doubling or tripling your entendres. Better to let The New York Times illustrate what it was all about.

Epstein had long been a treasured customer at JPMorgan. His accounts were brimming with more than $200 million. He generated millions of dollars in revenue for the bank, landing him atop an internal list of major money makers. He helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He helped executives troubleshoot crises and strategize about global opportunities.

But a growing group of employees worried that JPMorgan’s association with a man who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime—and was under federal investigation for human trafficking—could harm the bank’s reputation. [Ed. Note: Ya think?] Just as troubling, anti-money-laundering specialists within the bank noticed Epstein’s pattern of withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars in cash virtually every month. These were red flags for illicit activity.

We should all have learned by now that the owners and operators of major Wall Street banks have the ethics and public morality of Gaboon vipers. These gombeen bastards nearly blew up the world in 2008 and walked away clean. Meanwhile, they were enabling the biggest flesh peddler in American history.

That was why Epstein was at the bank’s headquarters. JPMorgan’s top executive in charge of ensuring compliance with laws and regulations had already pushed to fire him as a client. Now Stephen Cutler, a former federal securities regulator and the bank’s general counsel, had added his voice to the chorus.

Epstein’s chief defender at the bank was Jes Staley, a top contender to one day succeed Dimon as chief executive. Staley persuaded Cutler to sit down with Epstein and “hear him out.” It was a high-stakes meeting for Epstein; his close ties to JPMorgan had been invaluable in his quest for money, influence and legitimacy. The bank lent him money. Staley dished confidential information to him. At Epstein’s behest, JP Morgan set up accounts—into which he routinely transferred huge sums—for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations. It wired his funds overseas. It even paid him millions of dollars.

Sounds like there are a few accessories after the fact walking around free. The numbers Epstein was dealing in are staggering. It’s like Madoff without the fraud.

Epstein was on his way to becoming one of JPMorgan’s most important clients. A 2003 internal report pegged his net worth at about $300 million. The report, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, noted that Epstein’s occupation was advising wealthy individuals like Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire operator of brands like Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, though bank documents at the time did not list any other clients. That year, JPMorgan attributed more than $8 million in fees to Epstein, making him the biggest revenue generator among investor clients in the private-banking division.

But the report overlooked something that, had it been taken seriously, might have dimmed the bank’s enthusiasm. In 2003, Epstein withdrew more than $175,000 in cash from his JP Morgan accounts—a huge haul, even for someone with millions at the bank. Outside investigators later found that Epstein paid almost that exact amount to women that year. JPMorgan recognized that those withdrawals needed to be reported to federal regulators that monitor large cash transactions. But the bank failed to treat those withdrawals as an early-warning system for itself. Indeed, JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering specialists subsequently acknowledged that such withdrawals should have alerted the bank to the possibility that Epstein was committing crimes.

Yeah, but...

JPMorgan, however, was all in. Soon it opened accounts not just for Epstein but also for his companies, including one that handled the affairs of his private island, Little Saint James, off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank also provided financial backing for Epstein to help Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout who had been the subject of media reports about drugging and raping women, start a modeling agency called MC2. JPMorgan would ultimately open at least 134 accounts for Epstein, his companies and his associates.

Wittingly or not, the bank was supporting important cogs in Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and have sex with him. Some of Epstein’s underage victims said MC2 lured them to the United States with the prospect of paid modeling work. (In 2022, Brunel died by suicide in a French jail cell after being charged with raping teenage girls.)

It’s amazing how these smart guys never notice what was going on below them. CDOs? Bullshit mortgage bonds? Rigged ratings agencies? How were we supposed to know? Sex trafficking? Obvious laundering of massive amounts of cash? Could have fooled us. The fact is that in both cases there were people warning these geniuses of the impending catastrophes: Brooksley Born in the case of the crash of ’08 and, evidently, in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, a whole lot of people in JPMorgan’s watchdog operations. The bank continued to do business with Epstein even as investigators were running him to ground. Morgan floated a loan to him a) shortly after Epstein had been indicted for a sex crime in Florida and b) while an internal JPMorgan task force allegedly was examining the bank’s relationship with Epstein.

They couldn’t quit him, any more than they could quit the mortgage-backed-securities carousel as it spun the economy into middle-earth.

Read the whole thing and realize how deep the corruption at the top of American society goes and how little of it trickles down to the rest of us. At least Carnegie built libraries.

[admin]

'Remove Trump': Epstein bombshell reveals he wanted president’s name off high-profile list
by Alexander Willis
Daily Beast
September 11, 2025 9:26AM ET



Jeffrey Epstein asked convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to “remove Trump” from a list of high-profile figures in an email exchange in 2006, according to a bombshell report from Bloomberg published Thursday.

Trump has been under renewed scrutiny in recent months for his past ties with Epstein, who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, following the publication of a bawdy letter Trump had allegedly sent the disgraced financier in 2003. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, calling theories around Epstein a “hoax.”

However, according to a batch of 18,000 emails obtained by Bloomberg, Epstein had mentioned Trump multiple times in private emails in the mid-2000s, including in a request to have him removed from a list of powerful figures.

“Please review list and add or remove peeps,” wrote Maxwell in an email to Epstein dated Sept. 14, 2006, alongside a list of 51 powerful figures that included lawmakers and business executives.

“Remove Trump,” Epstein responded, according to Bloomberg, which exclusively obtained the emails and thoroughly vetted and reviewed them with four independent experts.

The purpose of the list of powerful figures was unclear, Bloomberg wrote, given that the email had no subject line or additional context that would give clues as to why Epstein was compiling a list of names.

The email exchange took place just two months after Epstein was first charged in Florida for prostitution, a charge that, despite the FBI having identified at least 40 potential minor victims, saw Epstein given a plea deal that saw him serve just 18 months in prison, and be allowed to leave on work release for up to 12 hours a day.

That plea deal was offered by then federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, Trump’s Labor secretary during his first term, who said he offered Epstein the generous plea deal because he was told to “leave it alone,” that the matter was “above his paygrade” and that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”

Another mention of Trump came from an email dated Aug. 23, 2007, this time just one month before Epstein agreed to his plea deal that also granted immunity to any of Epstein’s potential co-conspirators.

“You have to assume they went to Donald Trump then, Gossman, the docs in [West Palm Beach], Paschow etc.,” Maxwell wrote in an email to Epstein.

Bloomberg reporters’ analysis of the email speculate that Maxwell was referring to members of the press contacting those in Epstein’s circle following the charges filed against him; Abe Gosman, a real estate investor who sold Trump a Palm Beach mansion in 2004; and Joel Pashcow, another real estate developer who sent Epstein a photo of the disgraced financier holding a novelty check, apparently signed by Trump, suggesting Epstein sold him a woman for $22,500.

Trump continues to face mounting pressure over his past ties with Epstein, with Democratic lawmakers – along with a few dissenting Republicans – continuing their push to unseal additional documents on Epstein currently held by the Justice Department.